AI for SMBs: 5 Ways to Use AI in your business

SMBs – small to medium-sized businesses – have the most to gain from adopting AI.
AI will increase your efficiency and profitability without sacrificing quality.

The best part?
Most of your competitors are not using artificial intelligence to its full capacity (or even at all), so you have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to outstrip them.

Feeling overwhelmed by the AI challenge?
In this article, you’ll learn:

• Why SMB leaders like yourself must embrace AI now

• Different ways to use AI for SMBs to encourage growth across your business

• AI success stories you can emulate

The Benefits of AI for SMBs

SMBs are the perfect candidate for optimizing with AI.

Why?
Because small to medium businesses are stretched for time and resources. You’re trying to deliver the absolute best for your customers with a small team and limited budget. On top of this, you’re wasting hours on repetitive tasks.

So, a tool that saves you time without sacrificing quality is an absolute godsend.

With proper use of AI, you can:

• Increase productivity and cost savings across all teams

• Automate repetitive tasks that take up hours every week

• Standardize processes

• Boost the quality of your work

• Innovate and offer better solutions for your customers

• Promote employee happiness and retention by allowing team members to focus on rewarding work

How can SMBs use AI?

So, now you’re convinced you need to adopt AI into your business. You’re probably wondering: what can we actually do with AI?

In this next section, I’ll outline some of the top use cases for AI in small to medium businesses.

1. Intelligent AI-powered Chatbots

Chatbots have been used in customer service and sales for years.
But the new generation of AI-powered, intelligent chatbots are worlds away from what we’ve known.

Past chatbots operated on a logic tree: “If this happens, do this.” There was a limited set of options you had to map out in advance.
If a customer asked an unconventional question, the chatbot wouldn’t know how to respond.

Modern chatbots are powered by LLMs, meaning you can give them roles and goals. They’re not limited to a standard set of questions and responses and use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand and answer almost any request.

Putting one of these bots on your website can help improve customer engagement, solve customer problems, promote sales, and save manpower.

If you’re using a CRM or marketing automation, you might already have access to an LLM-integrated chatbot, so check this before investing in any new tools. Setting up a chatbot is simple: you can give it access to your website and documentation, and it will be able to train itself.

Chatbot Choice – Traditional Chatbot vs Intelligent Chatbot

2. Content Creation

Content is still a key marketing channel for most businesses, and 74% of companies have found it effective for boosting leads. But, nearly half (48%) of all content marketing work is outsourced.

Instead of investing an enormous budget in copywriters, designers, and videographers, AI allows SMBs to spend less on contractors and get some work done in-house.

Use it for:

• Content ideas — ChatGPT can help you research topics and ideas, get keyword suggestions, and develop a content plan

• Blog articles and social media posts — Create briefs and outlines for content writers in minutes. You can even get a decent first draft, so you only need to do minor edits

• Website copy — Refresh your website copy to pitch your services to anyone who lands on your page

• Original images — Tools like MidJourney and Dall-E are perfect for whipping up images to accompany social media posts or in your blogs, as a great alternative to stock photos

• Video creation — If you create video content, you can use AI to automatically edit and add captions so it's ready to post

This is just the tip of the iceberg. You can dive much deeper into AI content creation by creating GPTs trained on your brand voice or using advanced AI video creation software.

Leveraging AI in Content Marketing

3. Sales Assistance

Another awesome way to use AI is to speed up your sales cycle. Sales drive profit, and with the help of AI, you’ll be able to maximize sales with less effort.

You can use AI to:

• Automatically record meetings and generate notes and summaries

• Draft cold emails, follow-ups, and proposals

• Standardize sales data and notes

• Automate tedious processes like data entry

AI can provide every salesperson with a personal assistant to reduce manual work and assist with daily tasks. This frees up time for meeting with potential clients and customer relationship management.

AI-Enhanced Sales Cycle Funnel

4. HR recruitment process

There’s a common fear that AI will take our jobs, but what if AI could actually help companies hire the best people?

Examples of how AI can be used in HR:

• Write good job descriptions to attract ideal candidates

• Analyze resumes to select the best candidates for a role, matching them to job descriptions

• Create customized questions for interviews

• Build personalized training based on new hires' skills, experience, strengths, and weaknesses

• Analyze employee feedback from surveys and conversations to gauge overall sentiment and identify potential issues

• Standardize performance reviews by analyzing objective data like project outcomes, feedback, and KPIs

5. General admin

AI can be used in every department across your company to reduce the time spent on tedious administrative tasks and improve documentation and accuracy.

For example, AI can help you create a library of process docs, SOPs, guides, and knowledge. With AI, you can write anything from your new hire and client onboarding processes to company guidelines and procedures much faster.

Use AI to:

• Build a library of knowledge and automatically categorize, tag, and organize documents

• Extract relevant information from company knowledge

• Automate internal reporting, pulling data from sales, finance, and operations departments

• Automate complex workflows and manual tasks like data entry

• Record meetings and get AI to take transcripts and meeting notes

Notion is an excellent tool for this kind of work because it combines a customizable, all-in-one workspace with the power of AI.

It’s efficient to have AI built into the workspace where you organize all your information, so you don’t have to copy things over from other tools.

AI for SMBs – where to start?

Don’t know where to start?
Here are my tips for integrating AI into your workflow:

• Identify tedious tasks
  Start by assessing how team members spend their time. AI is most useful in automating tedious, repetitive tasks that take team members away from high-impact work. Focus on just a few AI use-cases at first, and you’ll quickly see increased efficiency.

• Use accessible tools
  Before investing in new AI tools, check which tools in your tech stack have AI features you can try. ChatGPT is a great tool to begin with because you can use the free plan, and the premium version is budget-friendly.

• Educate employees
  Your team members may worry about what it means for them if AI is rolled out. However, it’s important to introduce AI in a positive way and show them how they will benefit. Many team members may already use AI in their jobs, so encourage them to share their knowledge.

• Prioritize customer experience
  AI should only be used where it can improve the customer experience. Make sure to consider the end user when you implement AI solutions.

• Consult an AI professional
  An AI consultant can help you analyze your needs, provide training, advice, and custom solutions to help you get quick ROI from AI.

My ultimate goal is to help leaders and their team members to adopt an AI-First Mindset. This means, whenever you start a new task or project, you first ask:

“How can AI help me do this better or faster?”

Want to increase your efficiency and profit by adopting AI in your business?
Reach out to book a consultation!