Running a small business is challenging. Juggling financial responsibilities, managing employees, ordering inventory, and creating products and services requires significant mental focus and superb time-management skills.
Some small business owners are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to help offload some of those responsibilities. An estimated 48% of small businesses have already used AI to help their companies.
Here are some practical applications where AI could help you manage your daily tasks.
1. Writing blogs and social media posts
Many small businesses need a strong online presence to stand out. However, not every business owner has the time to craft blog posts that are optimized for search engines or wants to write social media posts on a regular basis.
AI is pretty good at doing both of these tasks if you feed it the right information. Recent data show companies can save 25% to 74% of time using AI to create content. Using ChatGPT, Claude, or Microsoft’s Copilot, you can quickly create posts for your blog or social media accounts and then edit them to fit your business’ tone and voice.
2. AI accounting analytics
Even if you don’t know much about AI, it’s likely that you’ve already used some artificial intelligence features in your preferred accounting software. For example, QuickBooks Online can look at all of your business transactions and recommend categories for your expenses.
And many accounting software products dial up their AI capabilities even further by offering financial forecasting. The software uses AI to analyze your spending and revenue and can forecast your cash flow up to 30 to 90 days. This can be helpful for business owners who might have a difficult time visualizing how their business spending and product sales will even out in the coming months.
3. Use a chatbot on your website
While chatbots aren’t new, recent AI advancements have made them much more effective. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce says that small businesses use AI chatbots to offer online customers 24/7 customer services, field sales leads, and answer customers’ frequently asked questions.
Depending on your needs and your business’s technical abilities, you could build your own bot from an existing platform like ChatGPT or Copilot or integrate an existing one through a customer service platform like Zendesk.
Research from Dashly shows that bots have a threefold higher sales conversion rate than online forms, and 50% of customers say they enjoy using a chatbot.
4. Customer relationship management
Many popular customer relationship management software programs have implemented AI to help small businesses. The new AI features range from creating personalized email marketing campaigns to using customer metrics to predict sales conversions.
The great thing about integrating AI tools in your CRM is that you don’t need to know much about artificial intelligence to use them. Many popular CRMs like HubSpot, Freshworks, and Salesforce already have AI capabilities integrated into their platforms.
Your competitors are likely using AI
Not all AI tools will be useful for you and your team. But it’s a good idea to test out some artificial intelligence services because it’s likely that your competition is doing the same.
And with just 42% of businesses saying that they have sufficient financing for their business, implementing AI could help your company do more with less.
