Three Small Business AI Tools

It’s rare for me to get through the workday without somebody bragging about the wonders of AI and how it can be a game changer for anybody’s business. Big business is spending billions and billions of dollars investing in AI tools to improve their operations, sales, marketing, and even finance, and those investments are already starting to show real impact for them. 

But for small businesses, AI can feel like a complicated, impractical, and overwhelming distraction to your tried and true practices that work well, making it difficult to know whether it’s worth the time to start thinking about how AI might help you. 

My personal opinion is that AI can be a highly useful tool for small businesses — as long as you are selective in how you use it. If you are a small business owner who’s interested in AI but unsure where to start, here are three areas that we have already been using it in that have been incredibly helpful to us:  

1. (Useful Idiot) Department Head Advisor. If you are a very small business like us, chances are good that you don’t have a subject matter expert on staff for every discipline needed to run a successful business. HR, Finance, Sales, Marketing, Operations, and Quality are just a few examples of the subject matter experts any small business owner would love to have on their team but often can’t afford. Well, you can ask the big AI tools the same questions you would ask one of these experts and get guidance on the areas where you need help. Obviously, you still need to use the judgment of your own un-artificial intelligence to determine whether the advice you receive is worth following.  
2. (Useful Idiot) Draft Content Creator. AI can also be quite helpful in getting a first draft of many pieces of content that are routine for small businesses. Need a new blog post? Targeted Web Page? New job listing? You can use AI to put together a good starting point for any of these pieces of content. That being said, I would not expect a final draft version of any of these documents to come from an AI tool today. You will still need a human being to tweak and revise the content before putting it out there.
3. (Useful Idiot) Virtual Assistant. AI can be extremely helpful with managing routine business operations. Pretty much all of the task management solutions (like Trello and Asana) have an AI feature built in these days, and AI can also be used to keep a sales funnel organized or set up calendar reminders for you. We’ve started a project internally to update our website’s chat feature to leverage AI, and I’ll probably write another blog post about that experience in the near future.

What’s With The “Useful Idiot” Qualifier?

AI is, in many ways, in its infancy as a tool for small businesses. And while there are a lot of things that AI can do to streamline tasks, you must understand that the advice, content, and assistance you receive from AI will be flawed. 

When I work with any AI tool, I try to keep the mindset that I am interacting with a piece of software that knows things I don’t… but also is 100% capable of giving me poor advice or content. Think of these tools much in the same way you would a college intern — they can be very useful, but also need close supervision and fact-checking to be helpful. Remember that and you should be fine.