The latest research shows that around 72% of surveyed organizations adopted artificial intelligence solutions for at least one business function. The list of surveyed companies includes different scales, from small businesses to international enterprises.

Still, while big companies like Google or Amazon have enough time and resources to design, develop, and train their AI models, small companies mostly don’t have such opportunities. Thus, it makes more sense to discuss the potential benefit of AI for small businesses and how it can help such companies improve their services or business operations.

So, let’s consider the most popular and efficient examples of using AI in small business for different purposes.

How Can AI Help Small Businesses?

First, we must clarify that small companies don’t have the resources and expertise to create new models unless we are talking about AI development startups. Fortunately, small businesses can still easily integrate open-source AI solutions like ChatGPT or its alternatives.

Using such third-party services is a cheap, surprisingly efficient, affordable solution for almost anyone. Besides, integrating these SaaS systems is relatively simple and fast, thanks to APIs.

Still, the possibility of using AI solutions for small business doesn’t explain what benefits it can bring. Long story short, the list of key advantages and features of such AI business integration includes:

Business processes automation

Enhancing customer support services

Improved financial management

Optimized marketing and sales

AI data analytics for decision-making

Automating Business Processes

The first and most potent solution AI integrations offer is the possibility of automating various business processes.

However, it mainly includes straightforward repetitive tasks requiring a manual approach and employee engagement. For instance, it can be updating some information or data, support in management practices, task estimation, emailing, meeting planning and scheduling, etc.

This might seem boring and trivial. However, streamlining these manual tasks saves a lot of time and resources in a longer perspective. Thanks to such implementations, your employees can get rid of such basic and routine assignments and redirect their resources to more complex or urgent tasks, delivering expected results much faster and qualitatively.

Otherwise, you must train your model first if you plan to utilize AI automation services capable of dealing with more specific or complex tasks directly related to business operations. Fortunately, templates and examples of using AI in small business process automation exist.

Customer Service Automation with AI Chatbots

One of the most popular ways to use AI software in small businesses is automating customer support services.

To enable such a feature, your company has to take just a few simple steps:

Choose the most suited Natural Language Processing model (NLP)

Integrate it into your business software (web platform, application, etc.)

Train and test the chatbot to answer according to your needs

It is an effortless yet elegant way to streamline customer conversations and automate some parts of support services. For instance, answering FAQs, offering support on business services or application functionality, etc. As a result, such AI in small business can significantly boost the performance of your customer support department, engaging your employees only in complex or very specific cases.

Besides, such functionality can be easily enabled using almost any existing NLP model: all of them are chat-based and commonly distributed via open-source APIs, requiring nothing more than some basic skills in software development.

Still, don’t forget that you should train and test your AI chatbot model before making it available to all users to achieve better and more accurate results.

Simplifying Financial Management

Another potential use case of AI for small businesses is simplifying financial management.

Artificial intelligence models are based on algorithms and show excellent learning capabilities. So, hypothetically, you can train any model to perform different tasks if you gather enough data for such training first. As a matter of fact, finance management is one of the best candidates for such automation: each business gathers, sorts, and analyzes such data all the time. So, even the smallest companies have the potential to create an ultimate finance management advisor using such processed data from their business activity.

With virtual assistants’ excellent computation and calculation capabilities, you can get compelling software that will advise you on optimizing your financial operations and achieving higher ROI. Alternatively, it can be used as a supplemental instrument for analyzing and processing financial information or any other task in this field.

Optimizing Marketing and Sales

AI for small businesses has all the required instruments to help in optimizing marketing and sales.

Pattern seeking is one of the built-in features present in any artificial intelligence model. Simply put, AI-driven software can handle and analyze big data and find similarities or other correlations. So, with proper training and prompt engineering, such integrations can become an excellent tool for increasing your competitive edge and sales.

Apart from it, models like ChatGPT show great personalization and customization features. Long story short, you can adjust their response, asking them to act in a certain matter. Businesses can also use this feature to explain the target audience’s specifics and needs.

This can be used for additional personalization of content recommendations, enhancing marketing and sales strategies even more, which will be highly beneficial for a range of companies, especially in the eCommerce industry.

Enhancing Decision-Making with AI Data Analysis

Finally, all the foregoing features of AI for small businesses can be used as a personalized business advisory instrument.

Small companies can use data analysis, pattern recognition, calculation, and process automation to cover many of their operations. Still, one of the most challenging use cases of AI for small businesses is improving decision-making.

In a nutshell, thanks to NLP and tokenization, modern AI models can quickly process data arrays, giving an accurate and precise summary of the “fed” data. With a proper approach and prompt engineering skills, businesses can not only speed up the summarization of historical data but also take a glance into the future.

For illustration, thanks to pattern recognition, eCommerce companies can predict the supply and demand ratios, making steps to efficient resource management and trend predictions. Still, this part is tricky and challenging due to several factors. Two core factors are:

The need to share confidential business information for training the model

Unknown accuracy of AI predictions due to a limited number of successful cases

Yet, if you are ready to take your chances and risks, integrating AI for small businesses is an excellent choice that can pay off your risks and bring much value to your table.

Summary

Summing up all the above, AI solutions for small business are becoming must-have features in the modern world.

Integrating such tools doesn’t require much resources or time, and it demands minimal skills at the moment. Conversely, using AI in small business offers many valuable and powerful advantages, even with minimal investments.

Eventually, this software is relatively new and keeps improving daily, making it hard to predict how can AI help small businesses in the next 5 years. In this term, it will likely scale a lot and suggest even more complex and elegant services for small companies, still demanding just a little initial investment.