AI Tools to Help Your Small Business Thrive

Artificial intelligence usage is growing at a blistering pace. According to a recent Boston Consulting Group Center for Customer Insight Survey, over 75% of respondents have used ChatGPT or another AI service. As AI becomes more readily available and accessible to the broader public, there’s a subset of that group that can’t ignore AI either: small business owners. 

You might think that AI is just for enterprise-level companies, those with large budgets to spend. However, that isn’t the case. AI, in many free and inexpensive forms, is available for all kinds of business owners, whether you are a solo owner or have a handful of employees at your disposal. 

But why now, you might be wondering? Well, because of how much potential AI has to increase your business’s efficiency through automating tedious, time-consuming tasks. By not getting comfortable with some form of AI, your business could lose some of its competitive edge. 

To help you get a handle on AI tools for your small business, we’ll cover why AI matters for the growth of your business, areas you can use AI immediately and effectively and examples of AI products you can use. Plus, we’ll also debunk some common AI myths. Let’s get started. 

Why AI Matters for Small Businesses and Their Growth

AI in modern businesses is slowly becoming a staple—at least business sentiment seems to indicate so. The Small Business and Entrepreneurship Council’s (SBE Council’s) 2023 Small Business AI Adoption Survey found that 83% of small businesses plan to use AI in the coming year. Many respondents noted using AI for financial management, email, marketing tasks and sales, to name a few areas. 

In addition to completing menial tasks to give business owners more time to work on the business, AI is also giving small owners an upper hand against large corporations. For example, AI can analyze customer behavior patterns and market trends faster than competitors that do not use AI, giving them an edge on how to display their product or service. AI can be a massive competitive advantage for solopreneurs and resource-strapped teams, making it a necessity for small businesses that want to compete at the highest levels. 

Using AI for business growth can be powerful. Here are some key benefits the SBEC found small business owners realized when they used AI:

• Able to redirect resources and employees to higher-value work
• Able to keep prices stable for clients
• Able to pursue growth opportunities for the business
• Able to increase wages and benefits for employees

Key Areas Where Small Businesses Can Use AI for Marketing and Operations

AI is important, you might agree. But where should you start using it? 

Well, it depends on your business needs. Where are you getting bottlenecked? Are you having trouble onboarding new staff or new customers? Are you pricing yourself out of the market compared to your peers? Asking questions like these can help you consider where AI in business can best be implemented for your situation.

In the meantime, here are some departments where AI has provided ample efficiencies for small business owners. From a small business using AI for marketing to a company turning to AI for inventory management, there are many ways to consider using machine learning for business.   

• Marketing: AI excels at brainstorming, and so it’s an ideal marketing partner. Wondering about how to create a logo using your initials? Use ChatGPT to come up with an initial design you can work with. AI can also come up with email campaign ideas, brainstorm full-on marketing plans, create advertisements and write blog posts in record time. 
• Customer Service: Creating an AI chatbot to help clients on your website find order information, place an order or answer simple questions. Because chatbots can run 24/7, your customers can have bespoke support at all hours. If you take on numerous requests from clients in a day, AI can help you triage your support/request tickets in the proper order. This could help clients feel more fairly treated. 
• Sales: AI can complete more mind-numbing tasks in sales, such as customer information data entry, scheduling meetings and sending simple follow-up emails. AI can also handle more complex sales work such as lead generation scoring by measuring customer response data much faster than a human would. Or, by analyzing historical sales data for your company to forecast future sales using predictive analytics. 
• Operations: AI is proficient at analyzing and interpreting large swaths of data. This makes it an ideal tool for inventory forecasting, bookkeeping, expense tracking and other data-focused operations small businesses carry out. AI-driven analytic tools can quickly categorize transactions your business makes, review your inventory for trends and even data entry errors or help you plan the schedules for employees involved in a large project.
• Human Resources: To be clear, AI isn’t a substitute for human-to-human interaction in HR departments. But it is a valuable productivity tool that can speed up—or eliminate—menial tasks. For instance, AI can survey submitted resumes to scan for keywords that match your job description to see if a candidate is a good fit. It can survey employee data and give you trends it sees. This can help you more accurately evaluate new hires.

If we’ve piqued your interest and you’re interested in using AI in your business, you might not know where to start. There are a lot of options to choose from. Here are 10 common AI tools that you can use across multiple departments. 

• Jasper or Copy.ai – Jasper is an AI content generation tool focused on creating multiple types of content (e.g. blog posts, SEO briefs, website copy). It works in multiple languages. The tool also has many content templates to choose from and offers editing tools, too. Copy.ai is another tool that generates content simply from user prompts. It also has multiple template types and comes with editing, ideation and refining abilities.
• HubSpot CRM AI or Zia by Zoho CRM – Hubspot’s CRM AI allows small businesses to see customer data, insights and team information in one location, allowing them to create better customer experiences faster. Zia is a similar AI, which can integrate with your website to automatically enter sales data, lead scoring information and create sales forecasts. 
• ChatGPT – ChatGPT is an all-in-one AI tool that can help with all aspects of your business. Think of it as a virtual assistant. By using prompts, you can create images, analyze data, create content, write emails, brainstorm and work through mountains of data. 
• Tidio or Intercom – Tidio has an AI chatbot tool that can respond to customers in real time in multiple languages while using customer details and data. Intercom has created a similar chatbot that can mimic behaviors and tone of voice, plus follow company policies when interacting with customers. It can also complete actions on behalf of customers. 
• QuickBooks with AI (Intuit Assist) – QuickBooks’ AI insight tool can make financial recordkeeping and invoicing less menial. By simply uploading an email and notes, you can create an invoice or expense record. Intuit Assist can also create personalized invoice reminders to help you get paid faster. 
• Grammarly or Hemingway – Grammarly is an AI writing-enhancement tool that offers personalized suggestions to your text as you write. It also rewrites/creates text for you. Hemingway is a similar app that uses color-coded highlights to help you improve your writing. Its AI-powered service completes these changes for you, rather than you doing them manually. 

Interested in a more in-depth review of AI tools for small businesses? Check out our survey of the best AI tools for businesses.

How to Implement AI in Your Small Business (Even if You’re Not Tech Savvy)

To start implementing AI tools and technologies in your small business, think of adopting any other tool or technology. Just because it’s AI doesn’t mean you need to reinvent the wheel. Try these steps to get started with AI solutions for your small business.

1. Identify pain points or repetitive tasks. Take stock of your current systems and processes and see where things are lacking. Where is your business facing a bottleneck? Once you find areas where your business is lagging, take note of them. 
2. Review AI tools that match your pain point. After you’ve identified inefficiencies in your business, you can find an AI tool that matches. For instance, let’s say you’re a small landscaping business—a one-person operation. You don’t have time for marketing or creating content, and you’ve recognized your online presence is suffering. So, start by finding a content-creating AI such as Jasper or Copy.ai.
3. Start small. Once you’ve selected an AI tool to use, start small. It can feel overwhelming to try to fix every issue in your business. You could consider trying one tool and one use case. Returning to the landscaping example, let’s assume you chose to use Jasper to create online content for your business. Instead of trying to create blog posts, video scripts, ads, website copy and more, consider focusing on one test case at a time. For example, try just using the tool to create simple blog posts. You might generate traffic to your site and bring your brand victory.
4. Measure your ROI and internal improvements. Now that you’ve started using an AI tool in your business, it’s important to measure its improvements to your business. Try using these questions to determine if AI has made an improvement:
   1. How much time have you saved using an AI tool rather than doing the task yourself? 
   2. Using the time saved, have you been able to generate additional revenue? 
   3. Are your employees reporting less time spent on menial tasks since you introduced the AI tool? 
5. Train your team and monitor their progress. When you’ve determined a specific AI tool works well in your business, start training your staff to use it. Once they’ve been trained on the tool, monitor their progress with continuous AI check-ins to make sure they are using the tool to its fullest capacity. You also want to get—and leverage—feedback from them as much as possible. 

Overcoming Common AI Myths for Small Businesses

Deciding on what AI tool to use and training you and your team aren’t the only obstacles in the way of your business finding productivity increases. There are common AI myths for small businesses that can hold you back, too. 

• “It’s too expensive.” → Many tools—including many we noted above—have free trials, free tiers or inexpensive starter programs to get you going. ChatGPT, the most well-known AI in the world, has free and paid versions for all users. 
• “It’s too technical.” → AI tools are designed for minimal technical knowledge requirements, especially the most general use-case models. For example, ChatGPT, Claude, DeepSeek and other large language models (LLM) only require clear, written instructions in your language. If you ever get stuck on how to prompt the AI tool, you can simply ask it for help. 
• “It replaces human jobs.” → While studies have come out noting that AI could potentially disrupt millions of jobs across the globe, it’s debatable whether increased productivity could lead to mass unemployment. In some ways, this fear is looking at the problem the wrong way—the loss of a task for an employee doesn’t mean their livelihood is at risk, it just means the way they work is changing. AI used ethically and responsibly can enhance employees’ jobs and help small businesses thrive.
• “You need to use everything at once.” → As we mentioned above, the best way to start implementing an AI tool in your business is slowly. Start with a simple use case (e.g. creating blog posts) and scale from there. It’s a marathon, not a sprint. 

The Transformative Impact of Artificial Intelligence in Small Businesses

From completing time-consuming tasks to improving customer experiences, AI tools can help small businesses access resources they never knew they had. But, for small businesses to acquire a pay off, they need to try one tool at a time. 

Try using one of the tools we discuss above that’s geared toward your specific business need. You might be surprised at the results. 

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