Today in Global Small Business: Trump's Obsession With More and More Tariffs

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• Tariffs are an obsession for President Trump, much as climate was for the Biden Administration. How else to explain his imposition of yet another round of border taxes three months before the November election despite their political unpopularity and economic harm?
• ChatGPT for small businesses.
• Latest tariff update(s) from Global-e.
• Quote of the week:  “The European Union questioned the new tariff, with its foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas calling it a “negative surprise” and rejecting the forced labor claims as unfounded."
• How people are really using AI in 2026 (HBR).
• What's going to happen with the U.S.-Mexico-Canada agreement?

Note:  The Global Small Business Blog has been in operation since 2004 and is ranked number one in the world for entrepreneurs and small businesses interested in going global.  As of May, 2026, we average between 700,000-900,000 readers a month.  Thank you for your engagement!  

AI Prompts to Help Grow Your Global Business

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ChatGPT has quickly become a household name, with businesses of all sizes leveraging the AI-powered tool to automate tasks and advance their workflows. While its adoption has been rapid, understanding the best practices to maximize its benefits takes time.

Here are 13 useful prompts for ChatGPT, along with methods for fine-tuning them to get high-quality results that help grow your business.

Note from Laurel:  I imagine you can use these same prompts with Claude.  Just insert 'global' in some of your prompts to think beyond your own borders. 

Today in Global Small Business: How Businesses Are Manipulating ChatGPT Results

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• Great article by Christopher Mims in the WSJ (gifted so you should get access) on how businesses are manipulating ChatGPT results.
• "Deciding What Matters Most" – Success On Her Terms wegginar® hosted by Women Entrepreneurs Grow Global, considered the best resource for women entrepreneurs and business owners who want to learn from other women business owners on how to expand their businesses globally, featuring episode #2 with Nancy Sharp, founder and CEO, Food for Thought Enterprises.  Register free of charge here thanks to the Baldwin Marcovici Group (Merrill Lynch).
• Quote of the week:  "Beijing benefits when the U.S. damages its own standing or retreats from global leadership, but China's own efforts to project state-sponsored soft power have produced mixed results." – Lizzi Lee, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute
• U.S. opens doors to tariffs on imports from countries supplying oil to Cuba.
• How to increase sales in the clothing business.
• How to lead when confidence is down, pressure is up and there's more uncertainty ahead.

Note:  The Global Small Business Blog has been in operation since 2004 and is ranked number one in the world for entrepreneurs and small businesses interested in going global.  As of February 1, 2026, we have more than 900,000 readers on a monthly basis.

The Decline of the Expert?

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Want to understand a medical diagnosis, learn how to export, challenge a legal contract, or make sense of an economic forecast? Traditionally, your only option was to trust a trained professional.  But now, AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and others are changing the game—offering clear, confident, and accessible answers to complex questions. 

This democratization of knowledge has tremendous potential.  But it could also be the decline of the expert?

Two Indispensable AI Tools: ChatGPT and Claude

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Two indispensable tools, Open AI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude, stand out as top AI platforms for global business owners.  Here’s why.

Code name: Strawberry

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OpenAI announced a new advance from GPT-4 that signals a shift in approach—a model that can “reason” logically through many difficult problems and is significantly smarter than existing AI without a major scale-up.

The new model, dubbed OpenAI o1, can solve problems that stump existing AI models, including OpenAI’s most powerful existing model, GPT-4o. Rather than summon up an answer in one step, as a large language model normally does, it reasons through the problem, effectively thinking out loud as a person might, before arriving at the right result. 

Code name:  Strawberry.

Today in Global Small Business: The New ChatGPT Challenger

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• The new ChatGPT challenger.
• Meta launches new AI tools for Facebook.
• The future of AI through the lens of the recent OpenAI debacle.
• Quote of the week:  "No one technology [OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard] has ever surpassed everything else."– iRobot co-founder Rodney Brooks
• The promise and potential pitfalls of increasingly powerful AI tools.
• The North star for the future of AI (requires subscription).

SMBs Level Up with AI

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November 2022 marked a mainstream shift in the release and adoption of various generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools and products. ChatGPT became the buzzword in the world’s boardrooms, on social media and at dinner parties, ushering in an AI divide, where a segment of the population fully embraced this technology, another was wary, and everyone else unsure.

As Sasan Goodarzi, president and CEO of Intuit, puts it, “AI presents the next tectonic shift in technology and will be the greatest driver of innovation since electricity and the internet—and generative AI is transforming the way humans interact with computers.” 

GenAI has democratized access to this information, and by using this technology, small businesses now have a resource that provides them with precise information collected from vast amounts of data that they can use to propel their business forward.

Global small business is the lifeblood of most economies, and as technology evolves, SMB’s need to become more competitive in order to drive growth in a digitally enabled landscape.  AI might just take them there.

Today in Global Small Business: ChatGPT Has Thrown a Wrench Into SEO

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• When search was king, companies could turn to SEO—and paid ads—to land atop search results. ChatGPT has thrown a wrench into that arrangement.
• Why e-commerce has plenty of room to run, especially global.
• For retailers, will your e-commerce tools survive federal data privacy regulations?
• Quote of the week: “In a few years artificial intelligence virtual assistants will be as common as the smart phone.” – Dave Waters
• Five (5) charts showing what's driving e-commerce growth.
• On Memorial Day 2023, honor the men and women who have served our country, USA, with bravery.

Today in Global Small Business: Inspirational Songs For Global Entrepreneurs

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What's affecting me, my clients, my colleagues and other global small business owners:

• Music can benefit your business, as it has for these 50 entrepreneurs. Check out their picks for inspirational songs (hint:  "My Way" by Frank Sinatra).
• Global retail ecommerce forecast 2023.
• ChatGPT as a thinking partner.
• Quote of the week: "One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain." – Bob Marley
• Developing positive character.
• Charting the global economy:  Inflation in US remains stubborn.

ChatGPT for Dummies

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ChatGPT for Dummies.  If there is not a book by that title, there soon will be.  Seriously, how smart is ChatGPT?  

In a technical report released on March 27, 2023, OpenAI provided a comprehensive brief on its most recent model, known as GPT-4.  Included in this report were a set of exam results, which have been visualized in this article.

The Way of the Future Is Through AI

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First there was ChatGPT, then DALL-E 2 and Midjourney, and now Blue Mail.  Artificial Intelligence (AI) is coming into our world fast.  If you are not familiar with any of these, check them out.

AI technology will become the way of the future soon – sparking creativity and expanding the range of what's possible.

The Dark Side of Artificial Intelligence

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Scientist Gary Marcus for Scientific American claims something incredible is happening in artificial intelligence right now—but it’s not entirely good. Everybody is talking about systems like ChatGPT, which generates text that seems remarkably human. This makes it fun to play with, but there is a dark side, too. Because they are so good at imitating human styles, there is risk that such chatbots could be used to mass-produce misinformation.

He goes on to give a sense of how it works with a specific example using the AI platform ChatGPT.  Check it out.  Making AI stick to the truth remains a serious issue.