Artificial intelligence, or AI, is everywhere today. You’ve seen articles, social media posts, and news stories about how it can make everyday online tasks much quicker, easier, and more cost-effective, but how can you integrate it into your business?
In this overview, you’ll explore several ways to use AI for your small business to make it run more smoothly, reach your target customers more effectively, and grow your business.
What is artificial intelligence (AI)?
In the simplest definition, AI is about using technology to help with much of the work humans would typically do. This technology has been in our daily lives for a long time: you’ve likely used it when you’ve used voice search on your phone, and you’ve witnessed its capabilities in IBM’s Watson system. Today, the “AI boom” is all about generative AI, which uses language models to learn and then create copy, images, and more.
Another example of AI at play is in research and data analysis. While medical researchers and doctors are still looking for ways to prevent and cure cancer, by using AI in their research, they can create models using data to predict outcomes of new treatments, personalize treatment plans, or integrate potential medical breakthroughs. The same is true in fields like agriculture and climatology.
While traditional software programs allow you to perform specific tasks, AI is designed to learn how to perform those tasks on its own.
While AI can give your business a competitive edge in streamlining your processes and more tedious tasks, there’s one important aspect to remember: anything created by AI still needs to be reviewed and approved by a human. AI is great for starting the development of a document, a task, or a spreadsheet, but it’s still dependent on human review, intelligence, and intervention to ensure its outputs are accurate and ethical.
How to integrate AI into your small business
As AI use in business expands, there are more opportunities to use it to boost your business. Many AI tools have free versions that you can use and, over time, you can level up to paid subscriptions if they offer more to meet your needs:
1. Automate everyday tasks
AI lets you automate tasks and processes within customer relations, marketing and outreach, invoicing, inventory management, and more! Here are some programs powered by AI to explore:
- Customer relations:
- Salesloft: a “revenue orchestration” platform that’s powered by AI to increase sales, identify challenges in the sales cycle, and share insights on revenue.
- Intercom: a customer service suite of tools, including an AI agents that handle customer questions so sales teams can focus on higher priorities.
- Nextiva: a customer experience management platform power-ed by AI to deliver personalized experience in every step of the customer journey.
- Marketing and outreach:
- HubSpot Breeze: a suite of AI marketing tools that can create content, provide insights, and perform outreach to customers.
- ChatGPT: a generative AI chatbot that can answer search queries, provide brainstorming collaboration, write copy, and more.
- Grammarly: an AI-powered writing assistant that checks for spelling, grammar, tone, and potential plagiarism.
- Financial management and analytics programs with AI-powered components:
- Intuit Assist: a generative AI financial assistant that plugs into Inuit’s suite of products and gives personalized recommendations.
- Xero: AI-powered accounting software that can capture key data from bills and receipts, reconcile invoices, and more.
- Sales Cloud Einstein: an AI-powered tool within Salesforce that can automate processes, make recommendations, and offer predictions.
- AI-driven operational-management programs:
2. Spot gaps for improvement
Find the holes in your operations and marketing – such as areas where you could use extra support but can’t afford to hire staff or consultants – and you may just find an AI solution that works.
For example, if you don’t have a website for your small business, Shopify, GoDaddy, Bluehost, Wix, and many more have AI-assisted website development programs that can create a great website in a fraction of the time it used to take, whether you simply need an informational presence or a robust ecommerce shop.
3. Identify opportunities to grow
These AI-driven tips from the Chamber of Commerce can help you identify and implement the appropriate steps to scale up your business.
How to make the most of AI in your business
While AI can create efficiencies, your customers will appreciate the things you do to ensure your business keeps a human element and an authentic voice. Here are some tips to balance this new technology with your human touch:
- Use AI to build efficiencies, and then use the time you recover to boost human connections. Remember that there’s a sweet spot to using AI for small business. Some entrepreneurs will integrate AI so heavily that they risk losing a human touch, while others will shy away from using it at all.
The key is using AI to make your operations smoother, more efficient, cost-effective, and ultimately, more profitable. Then, use the time and resources you regain to add the human-touch element of your business.
For example, because AI can automate your tasks, the time you save can be used to personally call your top clients to check in and thank them for their business. You can also use your newly found time to research trends, goods, and services in your industry, or to do something extra-special for your team. - Be sure you and your team are trained on your AI tools. AI programs are constantly learning. Although they can perform tasks with tremendous speed, their results still need careful review and assessment. This is true for all AI uses.
As always, if you and your team are trusted with sensitive information, such as financial or personal data, don’t share it with AI tools that aren’t meant to handle that kind of data. You could compromise the security of the information by adding it to the free version of an AI tool, which then learns from that data and shares its learnings with outside users. Remember, once information is entered into an AI tool, you no longer control how it’s stored, processed, or protected.
As a best practice, only enter the minimum amount of information necessary, and never enter personally identifiable or sensitive information. - AI pulls information from everywhere, which means you could unknowingly infringe on copyrights, intellectual property rights, trademarks, or other protected content. AI is still a new tool and can’t self-monitor for things that could potentially be legal challenges. Also, the vast amount of information stored in AI tools leaves them vulnerable to hackers.
Tools like Google Reverse Image Search can scan AI-generated images to see if an image already exists, for example, and you can use intellectual property scanning services to perform reviews of patent, intellectual property, and copyright infringement. Only use reputable AI tools with strong security systems to minimize your chance of being involved in a data leak.
Truly, though, the best way to protect your business is by using AI to assist your work, not replace it.
It’s better for your business and your customers.
Pursuit can help your business reach new heights
If you need financing to launch or grow your small business, to help implement AI, or to leverage other opportunities, Pursuit can help.
We’re a leading non-profit small business lender with loans from $10,000 to $5.5 million and we can help you secure financing for working capital, equipment, the purchase or construction of commercial real estate, to refinance business debt and more for businesses in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Nevada, Illinois, and Washington.
Apply today to get started!
