Should You Use Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Your Small Business?

October 1st 2024

In a nutshell, yes.

Now, exactly how you should use AI will vary by industry, even as the technology continues to evolve and improve, but refusing to at least explore what AI can do may end up stalling your company’s growth.

Some of you may be asking what, specifically, AI is and does.

AI is a type of software program that right now is frequently faster at handling repetitive tasks or for quickly tracking down publicly available data than humans are. You can use AI to automate processes that were previously manual, freeing up time to handle activities that require more brainpower, such as strategizing or problem-solving.

Some of the best current uses of AI include:

Customer service

Introducing chatbots and pop-up windows to answer customer or prospect questions on your website isn’t new, but as AI becomes more robust, so too do chat programs that answer the most commonly asked questions. 

With access to all the information on your company website as well as data on the back end, chatbots can now confirm that orders have been shipped, research policies, or gather feedback, all without human intervention. They can serve customers while you’re engaged in higher-value tasks.

You can also design the process to allow chatbots to refer questions to live humans when AI doesn’t have access to the information your prospect needs.

Scheduling

Quirks reports that 60% of small businesses use online calendars, which means there is a big opportunity to rely on AI to manage your time. 

Tools like Calendly and Motion help you share your availability with team members, clients, and prospects. No more time-consuming back-and-forth emails checking everyone’s availability.

You can also use scheduling software to track where you’re spending your time online. RescueTime can provide reports on how productive you’ve been, breaking down how much time you spent on certain documents, within certain apps, or on certain websites.

Financial management

If you currently pay a human bookkeeper to review your income and expenses regularly in order to prepare your books for tax time, you now have the option to automate that whole process as well. 

Online bookkeeping programs, such as Bench or Bookkeeper360, allow you to connect your bank accounts, credit cards, lines of credit, and any other financial instruments and have AI routinely categorize and aggregate all of your financial details for easy processing for taxes.

Hiring

New AI-powered hiring tools can take care of the first round of qualifying job applicants, by reviewing submitted resumes and determining which candidates may be a fit and which are too big a stretch. 

By setting up keywords you want the program to watch for, you can quickly separate the high-potential applicants from those who lack any relevant experience.

Content creation

One of the biggest applications of AI is for content creation, to create from scratch blog posts, articles, web copy, white papers, and other written materials. AI can be extremely fast at generating documents, which is certainly appealing, but it can also be wrong (AI hallucinations are when the program makes information up and presents it as fact.)

For that reason, the best uses of AI for content creation at the moment include generating everything except the body copy. Meaning, use it to create potential titles, headlines, and/or to generate a potential outline – but don’t use it to write the blog post or article. That’s the piece you’ll need to create yourself to avoid the possibility of either plagiarism or fiction being inserted without your knowledge.

Some of the most popular AI tools for content creation right now are ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude.

Then editing tools like Grammarly help by pointing out grammatical or spelling errors within your draft.

You can also use AI to generate illustrations to accompany your written work, though since you can’t copyright it, be aware that you can’t claim ownership.

Audio transcription and summaries

As the use of video conference technology has become the standard in businesses today, transcription tools can do everything from turning audio into text to summarizing meeting notes and even developing action items to assign to participants. Transcription tools like Rev and Otter are now commonly used for the quick conversion of audio files to text.

AI and other machine learning tools are increasingly being incorporated into work processes, to automate tasks that don’t require human involvement. It can also be used to process data, such as statistics, to reveal answers faster.

If you’re looking for ways to wring more minutes out of your busy day, consider exploring how AI tools can assume some of your workload.