At GradComm, we believe technology should serve people—especially the students, staff, and communities within the nation’s community colleges. That’s why our exploration of AI tools like ChatGPT is grounded in our core values: community college education, growth mindset, character, collaboration, and cheerfulness.
When I first started experimenting with ChatGPT, I quickly realized this wasn’t just a trendy tool—it was a way to help us deliver more value to our community college clients.
AI gives us new ways to brainstorm, write faster, and think deeper. But more importantly, it helps us empower our employees with tools that boost confidence and support thoughtful, high-quality work.
It’s not about working faster just for the sake of speed—it’s about delivering stronger ideas and better service to our partners in education.
Limitations of AI: It’s Not Magic (or Perfect)
AI tools like ChatGPT are exciting, but they aren’t flawless. Everything it produces must be reviewed, edited, and often refined by a human. GPT models don’t “know” anything—they generate ideas based on patterns in data.
That’s why you should treat AI like a collaborator, not a replacement. It can help you do your work better, but it can’t do your work for you.
What Are GPTs? And Why Should Community College Marketers Care?
GPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”—but all you need to know is this: GPT models (like ChatGPT) are powerful writing, brainstorming, and problem-solving tools. They’re like really smart, endlessly patient assistants that can help you:
- Draft social posts, press releases, and emails
- Generate content ideas when you’re stuck
- Outline campaign strategies or event plans
- Create lists of tasks from meeting notes or long team chat threads
For community college marketers—often juggling big goals with small teams—GPT tools offer a way to save time on repetitive work so you can focus more on strategy, creativity, and connecting to your audience.
How GradComm Is Using AI to Deliver More Value
We’ve built a small suite of custom GPTs to help our team work smarter and stay focused on what matters most: our clients. Our newest GPT is extra exciting—it’s designed not just to support our internal processes, but to guide employees through meaningful strategic questions depending on the task.
This is especially useful for less experienced employees because it helps them feel confident in how to move forward with their work while also teaching them best practices and helping them build strategic and critical thinking skills.
Some of the other ways we’re using AI include:
- Automating template-driven tasks (like creative briefs, project updates, and timelines)
- Drafting GradComm’s marketing content in GradComm’s our brand voice (Yup, it helped me with this blog post!)
- Coaching employees through our internal processes in a positive, confidence-boosting tone
Getting Started with ChatGPT
In an upcoming post, we’ll dig a little deeper into specific ways you can put AI to work for you. For now, I highly recommend spending time in ChatGPT’s “Explore GPT” area to see the wide-variety of things you can accomplish with custom GPTs!
