How to Write a Business Plan with AI (Complete Guide + 20 Prompts)

Founders who write a business plan are 16% more likely to achieve business viability than those who do not. Yet most people still put it off because the process feels overwhelming.

AI has changed that.

It removes the blank page problem entirely. The structure is always there. The language comes faster. What used to take weeks of drafting and revising now takes days.

But if you treat AI as the author rather than the tool, things fall apart quickly. You are still the strategist, the decision-maker, and the person who understands the market. AI helps you locate, organize, and articulate. You supply the thinking behind it.

This guide gives you a complete, section-by-section framework for writing a business plan with AI. You will get 20 ready-to-use prompts, an 8-point validation checklist, and industry-specific variations for SaaS, services, e-commerce, and local businesses.

What AI Can (and Cannot) Do for Your Business Plan

Before you open a chat window and start typing, it helps to understand where AI earns its keep and where it falls short.

Where AI genuinely helps

AI is excellent at the parts of business planning that slow most founders down.

• Structure: It knows what a business plan needs and in what order
• Language: It turns rough, jargon-heavy thinking into clear, professional writing
• Market framing: It synthesizes publicly available information into a coherent context
• First drafts: It removes the blank page problem entirely
• Research synthesis: It takes a pile of notes and organizes them into a readable section

Professionals across industries are already using AI chat tools to compress hours of work into minutes. Business planning is one of the highest-value applications of that shift.

Where you must lead

AI has hard limits. Ignoring them is how you end up with a plan that sounds impressive but falls apart under scrutiny.

• Your real financials: AI cannot know your actual costs, margins, or runway. It builds templates. You fill in the numbers.
• Competitive insight: AI knows publicly available information. It does not know what your competitors are doing internally, where gaps exist in your specific market, or where real pricing pressure is coming from.
• Founder vision: No model can articulate why you started this, what you have seen that others have not, or what your unfair advantage is. That requires you.
• Strategic judgment: AI will produce a logical plan. Whether that plan is the right plan for your specific situation is a call only you can make.

The rule is simple. AI writes. You think.

Build Your 5-Minute Business Brief with AI

The single biggest mistake people make when using AI for business planning is jumping straight into prompts without giving the model the context it needs.

AI fills gaps with plausible-sounding assumptions when it lacks real information. Those assumptions end up in your plan, and they are wrong.

The fix is a Business Brief. Write it before you touch any section prompt. Paste it into Chatly at the start of your session and fill it in completely. Every prompt you run after this will produce output specific to your business, not a generic template with your name swapped in.

Business name: [Name]
Business type: [SaaS / service / e-commerce / brick-and-mortar / other]
What it does: [One or two sentences]
Target customer: [Who they are, where they are, what they struggle with]
Revenue model: [How you make money]
Stage: [Idea / pre-revenue / early revenue / scaling]
Geography: [Where you operate or plan to]
Goal of this plan: [Raise funding / apply for a loan / internal roadmap / partner pitch]
Key differentiator: [What makes this different from existing options]

The 10-Section Business Plan Framework (With Examples of AI Prompts)

Every investor-ready business plan covers the same ten sections. The prompts below are built around the Business Brief you created above. Do not skip that step.

1. Executive Summary

The executive summary is the most read section of your plan. Most investors decide whether to continue reading based on it alone. Write it after every other section is complete, because it summarizes the whole.

Prompt 1: Draft the Executive Summary

Based on the following business plan sections [paste all completed sections],
write a compelling Executive Summary. It should be 200-300 words and cover:
what the business does, who it serves, the problem it solves, the market
opportunity, the revenue model, and what you are asking for (funding /
partnership / etc.). Write it for an investor audience. Tone: confident and direct.

Prompt 2: Stress-test it

Review this Executive Summary from the perspective of a skeptical seed-stage
investor. Identify any claims that are vague, unsupported, or that raise more
questions than they answer. Suggest specific improvements.

For a deeper look at what separates a forgettable executive summary from one that gets a follow-up meeting, the guide on how to write an executive summary covers structure and examples that apply directly to business plan writing.

2. Company Overview

This section establishes who you are before the reader gets into what you do. It covers your legal structure, founding story, mission, and vision.

Prompt 3: Draft the Company Overview

Write a Company Overview section for my business plan using the following brief:
[paste brief]. Include: legal structure, founding story (in 2-3 sentences),
mission statement, and long-term vision. Tone: professional but human.

Prompt 4: Sharpen the mission statement

Here is my current mission statement: [paste]. Rewrite it to be more specific,
memorable, and action-oriented. Give me three variations at different lengths:
one sentence, two sentences, and a short paragraph.

3. Problem and Opportunity

Investors do not fund products. They fund solutions to real problems with real market demand behind them. This section needs to make the problem feel urgent and the opportunity feel large.

Prompt 5: Draft the Problem and Opportunity section

Write the Problem and Opportunity section of my business plan for [business type]
targeting [audience]. Describe the core problem they face, why existing solutions
fall short, and what the opportunity looks like as a result. Back the opportunity
with market-level framing. Do not fabricate statistics. Flag where I should
insert verified data.

Prompt 6: Sharpen the problem framing

Here is my current problem statement: [paste]. Make it more specific and
emotionally resonant for a [target customer] audience. The goal is for an
investor to read this and immediately think: "Yes, this is a real and painful problem."

For more details, read: How to Write a Problem Statement?

4. Products and Services

This section is not a feature list. It is a value argument. The question it needs to answer is: why would someone choose this over what already exists?

Prompt 7: Draft the Products and Services section

Write the Products and Services section of my business plan. Use the following
details: [paste product description from brief]. Explain what it does, who it is
for, what specific problem it solves, and what makes it different from alternatives.
Lead with benefits, not features.

Prompt 8: Add a competitive differentiation paragraph

Based on this product description [paste], write a short paragraph that clearly
articulates the key differentiators. Avoid vague claims like "best-in-class" or
"innovative." Use specific, concrete language that describes what we do that
others do not.

5. Market Analysis

This is where many founders either wildly overstate the opportunity or understate it out of caution. The goal is a credible, reasoned estimate, not a number pulled from a press release.

Prompt 9: Build the Market Analysis

Help me write the Market Analysis section of my business plan for [business type]
targeting [audience] in [geography/industry]. Include:
(1) Total Addressable Market (TAM) estimate with reasoning
(2) Serviceable Addressable Market (SAM) for my specific segment
(3) Serviceable Obtainable Market (SOM) — what I can realistically capture in year 1-3
(4) Key market trends supporting this opportunity
Note which figures I should verify with primary sources before submitting to
investors or a bank.

For more details, read: AI Prompts for Digital Marketing

Prompt 10: Validate the market narrative

Review this Market Analysis section: [paste]. Identify any assumptions that are
too broad, any trends that need sourcing, and any sizing logic that an experienced
investor might challenge. Suggest how to make each weaker point more defensible.

AI can help you frame and structure market sizing, but the underlying data needs to come from real sources. The AI search engine is useful here because you can pull live market research mid-session without switching tools.

6. Competitive Analysis

A weak competitive analysis says "there is no direct competition." No investor believes that. A strong one maps the landscape honestly and explains where you win.

Prompt 11: Draft the Competitive Analysis

Write a Competitive Analysis section for my business plan. My business is
[description]. Key competitors are [list 3-5 by name or type]. For each,
identify their strengths, weaknesses, pricing model (if known), and who they
primarily serve. Then explain where my solution fits in the landscape and why
customers would choose us.

Prompt 12: Build a comparison framework

Create a structured comparison table for my competitive landscape. Columns should
include: competitor name, target customer, core feature set, pricing tier, key
weakness, and our advantage. Use the following competitor information: [paste].

7. Marketing and Sales Strategy

This section answers two questions: how do you acquire customers, and at what cost? It covers your go-to-market approach, channel strategy, and early sales motion.

Prompt 13: Draft the Marketing and Sales Strategy

Write the Marketing and Sales Strategy section of my business plan for
[business type]. Include: primary acquisition channels, go-to-market approach
for the first 90 days, customer acquisition cost assumptions, and the sales
process from first touch to closed deal. Be specific to [target audience]
and [geography/industry].

Prompt 14: Build out the go-to-market timeline

Create a 90-day go-to-market action plan for [business type] targeting [audience].
Structure it by weeks. Include the key activities, the goal of each, and what
success looks like at day 30, day 60, and day 90.

If you need help building the prompt strategy behind your marketing copy, the guide on AI prompts for business covers frameworks that apply directly to go-to-market messaging.

8. Operations Plan

The operations plan is the most underwritten section in most business plans. Founders skip it because it feels like an internal detail. Investors read it because it tells them whether you have actually thought through execution.

Prompt 15: Draft the Operations Plan

Write the Operations section of my business plan for [business type]. Include:
key operational workflows, technology and tools required to run the business,
supply chain or service delivery process (as applicable), and the operational
milestones for the first 12 months. Highlight where the biggest operational
risks are and how we plan to mitigate them.

Prompt 16: Identify operational risks

Review this Operations Plan: [paste]. From an operational risk perspective,
what are the three most likely points of failure in year one? For each,
suggest a mitigation strategy.

9. Team and Advisors

Investors bet on people as much as ideas. This section needs to show that you have the right people for this specific problem and a clear plan for the gaps you have not yet filled.

Prompt 17: Draft the Team section

Write the Team and Advisors section of my business plan. Team members and
backgrounds: [paste bios]. Advisors: [paste names and roles]. Highlight why
this team is specifically suited to execute on [business type] and identify
any key hires we plan to make in the next 12 months.

Prompt 18: Frame team gaps honestly

Based on this team profile [paste], identify the 2-3 most critical capability
gaps for a [business type] at [current stage]. For each gap, suggest whether
the right solution is a hire, an advisor, a contractor, or a co-founder.

10. Financial Projections

This is where most guides punt. They acknowledge AI struggles with financial modeling and move on. Here is a concrete workaround.

AI cannot give you accurate projections. It does not know your actual costs, conversion rates, or market. But it can build the framework, the formula structure, and the assumption set that you then populate with real numbers.

Prompt 19: Build a financial projection framework

I cannot provide exact financials yet. Help me build a financial projection
framework for [business type]. Create a Year 1-3 projection template with:
(1) Revenue streams and the assumptions I need to fill in
(2) Key cost categories typical for this type of business
(3) Break-even formula I should calculate
(4) Three scenarios (conservative, base, optimistic) with percentage assumptions
Format as a structured outline I can fill in with real numbers. Flag any figure
that is highly industry-dependent so I know what to validate before showing
this to a lender or investor.

Prompt 20: Stress-test your assumptions

Here are my financial assumptions for Year 1: [paste]. Review them from the
perspective of a financial analyst. Identify assumptions that are too optimistic,
too vague, or missing entirely. For each issue, explain why it matters and what
a reasonable alternative assumption might look like.

Once the framework is built in chat, use the AI Document Generator to export your projections as a structured, formatted document your accountant or financial advisor can work from directly.

For more detail about technical writing, please read: How To Use AI to Write Technical Documentation?

Industry-Specific Prompt Variations

The same ten-section framework applies across business types, but your prompts need to reflect your model's specific language and metrics. Here is how to adjust for four common verticals.

SaaS and Tech Startups

SaaS plans need to speak the language investors in this space expect.

• Replace generic revenue figures with ARR, MRR, and churn rate assumptions
• Include a product roadmap section showing the path from current build to full feature set
• Frame the market analysis around net revenue retention and expansion potential
• Add a section on CAC payback period and LTV:CAC ratio targets

When prompting for financial projections, add: "Frame revenue assumptions using MRR growth rates, monthly churn, and annual contract value. Include a cohort retention table structure."

Service Businesses and Consulting

Service businesses are often undervalued in their plans because founders underestimate the scalability argument.

• Lead with utilization rate and billable hour capacity, not just revenue
• Build the revenue model around retainer structures wherever possible
• Include a client acquisition funnel with average deal size and sales cycle length
• Add a section on how you scale beyond founder hours: subcontractors, team hires, or productized services

When prompting, add: "Build the revenue model around a retainer-first structure. Include assumptions for monthly billable hours, average retainer value, and client retention rate."

Retail and E-Commerce

E-commerce plans live or die on unit economics. If the numbers do not hold at the product level, the business does not hold.

• Lead the financial section with gross margin per SKU before any revenue figures
• Include a CAC breakdown by channel (paid social, SEO, influencer, etc.)
• Address fulfillment model explicitly: in-house, 3PL, dropship, or hybrid
• Add inventory planning assumptions for the first three months of operation

When prompting, add: "Structure the financial model around per-unit economics. Include COGS, gross margin, fulfillment cost, and CAC by channel. Flag assumptions that depend heavily on supplier pricing."

Brick-and-Mortar and Local Businesses

Local businesses are often the hardest to size credibly because public market data is sparse at the local level.

• Build market sizing from the bottom up: population, addressable percentage, average spend, visit frequency
• Include lease cost and buildout as a separate financial line item with assumptions
• Address foot traffic sources explicitly: walk-in, referral, local SEO, partnerships
• Add a break-even calculation based on monthly fixed costs versus average transaction value

When prompting, add: "Build the market size estimate from local population data, not top-down industry figures. Include lease assumptions, average transaction value, and monthly break-even visit count."

How to Validate What AI Produces Before You Submit

AI produces confident-sounding output. That confidence is not always earned. Before this plan goes to an investor, lender, or partner, run it through this checklist.

1. Market data sourcing. Every market size figure should trace back to a real source. If AI gave you a TAM without citing where the number came from, replace it with a figure you can defend in a room.

2. Financial assumption ownership. Every number in the projections section should reflect a decision you made, not a placeholder AI generated. You need to be able to explain any figure on the spot.

3. Competitive claim accuracy. If your plan makes specific claims about what competitors do or do not offer, verify them. Outdated or inaccurate competitive claims destroy credibility instantly.

4. Tone fit for audience. A plan written for a bank loan reads differently from one written for a seed investor. Read the document as your intended audience and adjust where the tone drifts.

5. Legal and regulatory accuracy. AI may reference regulations, compliance requirements, or industry standards that are outdated or jurisdiction-specific. Any legal claim should be verified with a professional.

6. Founder voice authenticity. The executive summary and company overview should sound like you. If they read like a template, an experienced investor will notice. Rewrite those sections in your own voice after the AI produces the draft.

7. Missing context AI could not know. AI does not know your existing customer conversations, pilot results, proprietary data, or unfair advantages. These are the most compelling parts of any plan. Add them manually.

8. Formatting and completeness. Before submitting, confirm that all ten sections are present, consistent in formatting, and that no placeholder phrases like "[insert data here]" remain visible in the final document.

Export and Submit Your Business Plan with Chatly

Writing a business plan in a chat interface is fast. Submitting a chat log to an investor is not an option.

The AI Document Generator solves this with a direct workflow.

1. Write each section in Chatly using the prompts above
2. Refine each section in the same session, keeping the full context
3. When your plan is complete, use the Document Generator to export the full plan as a formatted document
4. Download it as a structured file that your team, advisor, or accountant can edit directly

No copy-pasting between tools. No reformatting. The document that comes out of Chatly is ready to share.