Accelerate Your AI Success: How To Create Custom GPTs – Boot Camp Digital

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT or Gemini are powerful, but true efficiency comes from mastering the right tools at the right time. For businesses and individuals aiming to maximize results and accelerate efficiency, custom GPTs are a game-changer. Imagine an AI assistant pre-trained with your specific business knowledge, your unique brand voice, or your distinct thought leadership. That is the transformative power of a custom GPT, and I will show you exactly how to build one.

Summary: Your Custom GPT Journey

• Understanding Custom GPTs: Discover what a custom GPT is and how it differs from standard AI, offering you a specialized instance of generative AI tailored to your needs.
• When to Build A Custom GPT: Learn to identify repetitive tasks or workflows that demand consistent, specific instructions, signaling the perfect time for a custom GPT.
• The 8-Step Creation Process: Get a step-by-step guide from defining purpose to uploading critical data, ensuring your GPT is built on a solid foundation.
• Mastering Iteration & Troubleshooting: Understand how to test, refine, and fix common AI challenges like “hallucinations” to ensure accurate and reliable outputs.
• Real-World Impact & Future Potential: Explore practical applications today and envision how custom GPTs will become integral services for businesses and their customers.

What Exactly is a Custom GPT?

Think of a custom GPT as your own specialized instance of ChatGPT. While standard large language models are trained on a vast ocean of internet data, a custom GPT allows you to layer your own unique, customized training on top. This means you’re essentially adding to the AI’s existing knowledge base with your specific business information, your brand’s writing style, or your specialized expertise. When you use your custom GPT, all that added training is automatically included in every response, leading to more relevant and precise outputs.

NOTE: If you aren’t using Generative AI yet, upskill with Generative AI Courses to learn the foundations of how AI works and prompt optimization.

We’ve found that by pre-training GPTs, we can accelerate our AI success even faster than just using standard AI tools alone. It’s about leveraging the correct tools at the correct time to maximize our results.

When Should You Create a Custom GPT?

You don’t need a custom GPT for every task. If you’re tackling general inquiries or tasks you don’t do often, a standard chatbot works just fine. However, a custom GPT becomes invaluable when you face a repetitive task that requires a lot of specific instructions or ongoing coaching to get the results right.

If you find yourself consistently providing the same context or refining the output for a particular workflow, that’s a clear signal a custom GPT is your next strategic move. For instance, if you’re frequently generating social media content and always have to remind the AI about your brand’s specific tone, a custom GPT trained on your brand voice will save you significant time.

Your Step-by-Step Guide to Building a Custom GPT

Crafting your own custom GPT involves a clear, eight-step process designed to get you from idea to optimized AI assistant. While some steps might seem detailed, many are part of the initial creation and are relatively straightforward.

1. Start with a Clear Purpose

Before you dive into design, define exactly what you want your GPT to do and the specific outcome you want it to produce. Just like with a human team member, explaining the desired result empowers the AI to perform meaningfully.

Ask yourself these three key questions:

• What is the specific task you want it to excel at?
• Who is the intended user?
• What outcomes do you want it to produce?

For example, when we considered building a customer service GPT, its specific task was responding to pre-purchase customer questions. The desired outcome was relevant, helpful responses that inspire purchases. Or, for a social media content creator, the specific task is generating on-brand, strategic posts, with the outcome being plug-and-play content for your strategy. Defining these elements upfront sets your GPT up for success.

2. Write Detailed Instructions

This is where you begin to truly customize your GPT by telling it precisely what you want it to do. For the social media audit GPT I recently built, I instructed it: “A business owner or marketer will use this GPT to get feedback on their social media execution. You are an expert social media marketer. You will analyze their social media accounts and provide clear and specific feedback on the following areas: Strategy, Content strategy, Content optimization, Use of visuals, Brand consistency”. The more detail you provide, the better the results.

3. Provide Examples

Examples are a powerful training tool. Just as you’d show a new employee how you want something done, providing examples helps your GPT understand the desired format, style, or content. This can be embedded directly in the instructions or through uploaded files.

4. Use Custom Instructions for Tone and Behavior

Your brand voice is crucial. You can instruct your GPT to match your company’s tone. A simple trick I often use is to tell it to match the tone of voice of your website. You can also give it specific behavioral guidelines, such as ensuring feedback is detailed and actionable, grounded in best practices, and avoiding vague statements – a key tenet of effective communication at Boot Camp Digital.

5. Upload Reference Files

This is a critical step for deep customization. You can upload relevant documents, such as your books, marketing guides, FAQs, or financial statements, to build a comprehensive knowledge base. For example, to train a GPT to write like me, I uploaded PDFs of all my books. This ensures it pulls from my specific thought leadership and writing style. This method is often more effective than simply linking to websites, as real-time web browsing can be a challenge for AI.

6. Customize Prompt Starters

Once your GPT is created, you can customize the initial “conversation starters” that appear. These are pre-written prompts users can click to initiate a query. Make them relevant and helpful for your specific use case, guiding users toward the most effective interactions. For our social media audit GPT, starters might include, “What can I improve about my Instagram account?” or “How does my brand consistency look across accounts?”

7. Test and Iterate

No AI works perfectly on the first try. You’ll need to continuously test, iterate, and improve. Think of yourself as a detective: analyze the outputs, identify where the GPT falls short, and then go back to the configuration or creation mode to refine its instructions. This iterative process of using it, finding opportunities for improvement, and then editing is relatively easy and highly effective.

For instance, when I tested the social media audit GPT, it initially pulled very old information from our Facebook page. I realized it wasn’t browsing live internet content effectively. My next iteration involved adding a specific instruction: “When looking at social media content, only look at content from the last six months”. This ongoing refinement is essential for accurate results.

Troubleshooting: Mastering the AI Detective Work

One of the most valuable skills in training a custom GPT is troubleshooting. AI, particularly large language models, can “hallucinate” – meaning it sometimes generates information that isn’t factual or isn’t sourced from the data you provided. It also doesn’t always tell you when it can’t perform a task as instructed.

Here’s how to tackle common issues:

• Combat Hallucinations: If your GPT is making things up, you can try to turn off its general knowledge or web browsing capabilities to force it to rely solely on your uploaded data. You can also add very specific instructions, such as, “All information you use for your analysis should come only from the actual links provided. You should not use any other sources or assumptions”. I used this strategy when our customer service GPT kept fabricating dates for a non-existent Denver boot camp.
• Address Undesired Behaviors: If your GPT keeps doing something you’ve explicitly told it not to do (like using emojis, despite multiple “don’t use emojis” instructions), it might be that other, more dominant instructions (like a specific tone of voice) are inadvertently calling for that behavior. Try to rephrase instructions or add context about the desired feeling of the conversation (e.g., “the responses should feel like a conversation with a customer service rep, not marketing copy”). I’ve found this helpful in trying to get our customer service GPT to stop using emojis.
• Leverage Standard ChatGPT for Troubleshooting: If you’re stuck, go back to a regular ChatGPT chat and ask it for help. Explain the problem with your custom GPT (“It keeps making up information instead of only using information on the website, and I’ve told it to only use the website multiple times. What can I do?”). It can often provide valuable tips on how to adjust your custom GPT’s instructions.
• Understand Limitations: Be aware that AI struggles with real-time internet browsing. If your use case requires live web analysis, you might need workarounds, like asking the user to provide screenshots or specific data uploads instead. Our social media audit GPT, for example, couldn’t directly browse Instagram, so a workaround like uploading content would be needed.

Real-World Applications and the Future of Custom GPTs

Custom GPTs are already making an impact.

• Consider the “TalkaDot service (Speaker Research)” GPT. Speakers can input a similar speaker’s name, and the GPT will scour events from the last two years to find where they’ve spoken and provide contact information for booking opportunities, delivering the output in a downloadable spreadsheet. This is a prime example of a highly specific, purpose-built service.
• Another custom GPT I frequently use is one I trained to write just like me: clear, direct, and actionable, using short, punchy sentences. I uploaded all my books and extensive instructions to train it. The result? When I test its output using an AI content detector, it consistently shows a 0% chance of being made by AI. This means the content sounds genuinely authentic and personal, which is exactly what we want in our marketing.
• The next iteration of custom GPTs will see businesses creating them as a direct service to their customers. Imagine a financial services company offering a GPT that helps a small business owner assess their likelihood of qualifying for a loan based on uploaded documents, even before they book a meeting. While AI’s current limitations (like hallucinations) require careful management to avoid poor client experiences, the potential for such business services, both internal and external, is immense.

Get Started

Starting with a custom GPT for your writing tone of voice is an excellent first step, saving significant time in content creation. From there, explore use cases within your organization where you frequently coach AI or where results are inconsistent. These are clear indicators that more targeted training within a custom GPT can provide you with better, faster, and more reliable outputs.

Ready to start accelerating your AI success? Create your own GPT or learn how to train your organization on generative AI.