Breaking things, building a business

# Workplace & Business

# ChatGPT

# Awareness

# Work

# North America

How a Houston entrepreneur uses ChatGPT to grow the world’s largest rage room after profound loss

ChatGPT is helping small-business entrepreneur Kaija Pack turn pain into purpose. After the sudden death of her husband of 30 years, Kaija channeled her sadness and anger into what’s now the world’s largest “rage room” — a business designed to help people find a healthy, safe way to manage their stress by literally smashing their way through it. Now, she’s using ChatGPT to help grow the business. Kaija lives and works in Houston, and she attended OpenAI’s first-ever Small Business Jam in November to learn how to use ChatGPT to help run Break Life — where people pay to smash windshields and computer monitors — more efficiently. “I know it sounds strange, but I used to be scared of AI,” she said. “Now I can see that it’s an absolute gamechanger for a business with big dreams and a small team.” ChatGPT is already helping her learn more about her competitors, figure out how to best handle questions about her pricing, and increase her weekday traffic. ChatGPT has also helped her solve a tough messaging problem: explaining to people that her prices are higher than competitors’ because her space is bigger and better equipped. She used ChatGPT to brainstorm different options, and plans to start using one of its suggestions — “you pay more because you get more” — on calls with people with questions about her business. Kaija didn’t expect her life to look like this. She got married as a teenager and spent three decades building a life with her husband. When he died unexpectedly in 2019, she and her family moved from Detroit to Houston for a fresh start. She carried a mix of grief, sadness, and anger — feelings she thought she wasn’t supposed to have. “I thought angry people were bad people,” she said. “But I realized a lot of people are angry for valid reasons — and that’s OK.” That realization became the heart of Break Life Houston, the 10,000-square-foot rage room she built and now runs with seven members of her family. The space includes themed rooms, a wide range of breakables, and a dedicated “scream room” for anyone who needs a safe place to yell out their stress without an audience. The most popular things to smash include windshields, computer monitors, and TV screens. The business even sells (and wears) T-shirts with the phrase she loves: “If it ain’t broke, come break it.” Kaija was one of hundreds of entrepreneurs who learned practical ways to put AI to work at the Small Business Jam, which OpenAI offered with DoorDash and SCORE, in Detroit, Houston, Miami, New York City, and San Francisco. The sessions were designed to help Main Street businesses learn how to use AI to compete, save time, and grow. For entrepreneurs like Kaija, that meant hands-on help in using ChatGPT to become more efficient and punch above their weight. “There’s nothing wrong with being mad. It’s an emotion, and we should be able to express it without anyone judging us,” she said.