As a small business owner, your days are likely filled with juggling multiple tasks and responsibilities. You might be responding to customer emails one minute, then switching to create a social media post, manage your finances, or come up with ideas for your next marketing campaign. Every administrative task feels urgent, and sometimes it can feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day to complete everything.
But what if there was a way to free up some time and make life just a little easier? Enter AI tools. We’re not saying that AI is magic, but we are here to show you how it can help you with everyday tasks so you can breathe a little easier.
In this article, we will give you 8 practical, real-world ways you can use AI daily to save time and energy on your small business operations. We will cover how to use AI to automate repetitive tasks, get new ideas and insights, and stay on top of things, so you can use AI in ways that work for you and your business today, without needing a tech background or a big budget.
Table of Contents
1. Brand Assets & Graphic Design
One of the most impactful ways that we’re seeing AI revolutionize small business management is by simply giving business owners the opportunity to handle their own graphic design needs. Tools like Photoshop that are now including AI generative fill features are making it easier to customize images and transform them into bona fide, highly presentable brand assets – and all with a minimal learning curve.
AI tools can also generate video content as well as photos, so if you want to start utilizing the power of video marketing for your business, you don’t necessarily need to put the budget aside to invest in a videographer or even hone your own film skills to get the ball rolling.
2. Marketing and Copywriting Assistance
AI isn’t just helpful for generating or optimizing video or photo content, though. Nowadays, AI tools also allow small business owners to reclaim hours spent on copywriting and editing for everything from marketing materials to digital product descriptions, to social media and web copy and even email marketing copy.
With AI tools, you can produce polished, easy-to-read copy in just a matter of seconds. You can put a personalized spin on every cold email to boost your chances of getting a positive response. And if you want to maintain engagement by posting regularly on LinkedIn, social media, or even on your website blog feed, using AI to streamline your content production can help make these digital strategies more sustainable for your small business.
2. AI Customer Support Systems
In the age of convenience, customer service systems are an absolute must for any business. For small business owners, however, it may not always be possible to invest in dedicated customer service channels. Whilst a landline number for inquiries during business hours and a ‘Contact Us’ page on your website to collate any digital or after hours inquiries can be enough for most small businesses, companies who are looking to scale may opt instead to consider AI chatbot solutions.
With AI chatbots, your company can filter all but the most complex problems through AI, saving you and your customer support team hours of troubleshooting or filling out refund requests. Implementing a Customer support chatbot for website allows businesses to provide instant assistance to visitors, improving response times and overall user experience.
3. A Social Media Expert & Assistant
Advertising and promoting your business is like wrangling a many-armed beast, from socials and SEO trends to billboards or radio ads. So with all these options available to you, how do you determine which platforms and pathways will be most worthwhile for your business? And how do you make sure your messaging is optimal for that platform?
These are the questions that social media management tools have sought to answer. And now with AI integration revolutionizing these tools, it’s even easier to gain meaningful insights into how social engagement and even captions and post copy could contribute to commercial results.
With AI tools like the ones you can find at Buffer, Lately and Hootsuite, you can generate captions, hashtags and post ideas all from the one platform. And once those posts are good to go, you can even have them schedule your posts for each platform and monitor their performance and engagement.
5. Data Insights and Analytics
Believe it or not, but AI can help with monitoring performance metrics as well. For modern entrepreneurs, managing their success means engaging with business analytics and sifting through all the many data points you’ll accrue through running your brand. It’s a lot of numbers to learn and study when you could be focusing on the unique parts of your business, the stuff you love.
Thankfully, AI-powered analytics tools can help find order in the chaos, supporting business owners in spotting trends, making forecasts, and identifying opportunities for improvement or efficiency. The most common ways to do this is to use the AI insights that Google Analytics offers or Zoho Analytics, but there are plenty of other AI data analytics tools like industry-specific centralized platforms (i.e. IIoT centralized business management platforms that record data from equipment and machinery across worksites to provide cohesive overviews).
6. AI for Your Finances
Bookkeeping has long been the one thing that every small business wants to automate. No one wants to become an accountant along with running a business, so it’s exciting to see AI stepping up to the plate to play ball.
Expense tracking, fraud prevention, and smarter budgeting are all on offer from programs like QuickBooks’ AI, Wave, and Xero. In fact, if you’re already using a bookkeeping program like MYOB, they’ll likely have AI tools you can fit right into your current workflow, so look around.
7. Extra-Intelligent Hiring and HR
Another place that small businesses don’t have room for dedicated staff is in HR. It’s either the owner or the manager screening employees and slogging through resumes. There are already tools for sifting resumes, but with AI your automated HR team can do so much more.
From screening candidates, to scheduling interviews, to checking in on employee engagement and taking feedback. Many of these offer free trials, or test parses like Affinda, which offers 200 free resume screenings.
8. Personal Productivity With AI
For all these examples, AI is your little assistant, but what if they were literally your assistant? Taking notes, managing your tasks, taking meeting minutes, and transcribing chats. An AI assistant can be your all-in-one secretary.
Eventually they may even replace secretaries, but currently they are a little limited to the aforementioned notetaking and task management. Check out tools like Otter.ai, Notion Ai, and Motion to give them a spin.
Small Wins Add Up
AI doesn’t have to be complex or overwhelming. In fact, it’s just a tool to help you work smarter in your everyday business. Whether it’s drafting an email, sorting your data, or coming up with creative ideas, AI can become a powerful ally the more you work with it.
The secret is to start small. Identify one or two tasks where AI can save you time, then get creative and test things out. As you use it more, these little efficiencies add up, giving you more time for the things you love, like engaging with your customers, enhancing your products, and building your brand.
With AI working on your team, the small changes you make day to day will help it evolve into a true teammate.