I use ChatGPT constantly.
That should be obvious considering I am building Marketur around AI, WordPress and tools that let AI do actual work instead of just sitting in another browser tab.
But there is one thing I do not want ChatGPT doing for me.
I do not want it telling me my business idea is brilliant just because I described it enthusiastically.
I am perfectly capable of talking myself into spending money without artificial intelligence helping.
This is where using AI for business idea validation gets tricky.
ChatGPT can be incredibly useful for thinking through an idea. It can attack assumptions, organize research, identify competitors, generate interview questions and help design cheap tests.
But a confident answer is not validation.
AI is really good at making an idea sound like a business
Try it.
Describe almost any reasonable idea and ask for the target market, revenue model, competitive advantage and marketing strategy.
You will probably get something that looks surprisingly complete.
That is useful for brainstorming.
It can also create a dangerous illusion of progress.
The model can take your assumptions and build an impressive-looking structure on top of them. If the first assumption is wrong, the beautiful business plan does not save you.
I have learned the same lesson while building products. AI builders can turn an idea into a working interface ridiculously fast. That does not make the idea good. It means the cost of turning assumptions into software got cheaper.
Those are different things.
I want AI to argue with me
If I am using ChatGPT on a new business idea, I get more value when I tell it to find reasons the idea fails.
What am I assuming about demand? Who already solves this? Why would customers refuse to switch? Which platform dependencies could hurt me? What costs am I ignoring? What evidence would disprove the idea?
That is much more useful than “give me ten reasons this business will succeed.”
OpenAI itself has publicly discussed the problem of models becoming overly agreeable. In 2025 it explained why it rolled back a GPT-4o update after the model became too sycophantic.
That matters for validation because validation is one of the worst places for flattery.
Research changes the quality of the answer
There is a massive difference between asking an AI to reason from your description and giving it current evidence to reason over.
If I am evaluating a business idea, I want current competitors, pricing, search behavior, customer complaints, reviews and market changes.
Then AI becomes the analyst instead of pretending to be the market.
This is part of the thinking behind the free Marketur Reality Check. I want the idea challenged against evidence, not simply dressed up in a business-plan template.
Use AI to find the assumptions
One thing ChatGPT is excellent at is turning a fuzzy idea into explicit assumptions.
Suppose I say I want to build a subscription tool for WordPress business owners.
There are assumptions hiding everywhere.
WordPress business owners have the problem. The problem is painful enough to pay for. They want another subscription. I can reach them. Existing plugins do not solve it well enough. Support costs will not eat the margin. WordPress changes will not break the core value. The customer understands the product quickly enough to buy it.
Once those assumptions are visible, I can test them.
That is AI doing something genuinely valuable.
Use AI to design ways to prove yourself wrong
This is where I think AI can save builders a fortune.
Ask it for the cheapest experiment that could disprove each important assumption.
Maybe the test is ten conversations. Maybe it is a landing page. Maybe it is a $50 ad campaign. Maybe it is manually delivering the service before writing software. Maybe it is putting an actual price in front of people instead of collecting free signups.
I wrote more about this in testing a business idea before building the whole thing.
The goal is not for ChatGPT to declare the winner.
The goal is for ChatGPT to help you design a fight the idea can lose.
Do not let AI-generated research become fake evidence
This is another trap.
An AI can give you a market size, list competitors and cite statistics. That does not mean you should blindly paste those numbers into a pitch deck.
Check the sources.
For U.S. small businesses, I would rather start with sources such as the Small Business Administration than repeat a statistic because a chatbot sounded confident.
For search behavior, look at actual search data and tools such as Google Trends.
AI should make research faster. It should not replace the part where the evidence has to exist.
I still use ChatGPT for business ideas
A lot.
I am not writing one of those articles where I spend 1,500 words telling you AI is dangerous and then put an AI newsletter signup at the bottom.
ChatGPT has been involved in a ridiculous amount of what I build. I use it to think, write, code, research, troubleshoot and increasingly manage WordPress directly.
I just know what I want from it.
I want a sparring partner.
I want it to notice the thing I missed. I want it to tell me when the math looks stupid. I want it to find competitors I should study. I want it to help turn an expensive test into a cheap one.
I do not need it to tell me I am a visionary.
If you have an idea sitting in your head right now, put it through the Marketur Reality Check. Then take the weak spots it finds and investigate them yourself.
If the evidence keeps saying yes, great.
If it says no, that is useful too.
Either answer is cheaper than asking AI to tell you what you want to hear and then spending six months building it.