35% of UK SMEs now use AI tools, compared to 25% last year. As more and more small companies use AI tools, there will be a growing competitive disadvantage for companies that don’t use AI. These companies could be losing several hours per week as competitorsuse AI to keep up with business demands.
Competitive edge is built when businesses are the first to use new tools. The barrier for AI tools is actually low, and so is the cost and required technical savvy to use them. There are AI tools to help you write content, answer regularly asked questions, and maintain order and efficiency for data management.
The hardest part is determining which tools are valuable. Fortunately, the majority of AI tools on the market today don’t provide enough value for small businesses. These tools are often impressive for demos, but in actual use provide very little value. A high number of these tools are designed to help automate a business task that isn’t all that difficult to begin with.
As mentioned before, this is not a complete list of AI tools, but there’s a lot of tools for small businesses that provide enough value to help grow your business rather than just build some flashy UI.
For Writing and Content
The UK sees a lot of use for general AI assistants, ChatGPT and Claude, when it comes to writing practices. Both can perform the more traditional tasks of drafting or summarising writing when given longer documents. While the output is not completely ready to show to the world, it is infinitely better than an empty page. Writing with AI has the added benefit of saving a lot of time.
In terms of the complexity of the written instructions, Claude tends to handle these more accurately. ChatGPT has an edge on integrations and community support. For most use cases, either program is a good choice. Since both of their free tiers are available, it is worth the time to test both before subscribing to the paid versions.
Canva’s additions to their software are also useful to businesses in the same way. Though Canva now offers tools to assist users in designing flyers, social media posts, presentation slides, background removal, marketing materials, and more, the program is quite easy to learn and relies heavily on a suggestion based algorithm.
For Meetings and Admin
Otter.ai miraculously transcribes, analyses, and summarises video calls. Users of the free version can use Otter for approximately 5 hours a week before defaulting to the paid version. For most users this is more than sufficient time to sample and get a feel for the correlation of time saved from the many working hrs spent taking meeting notes.
NotionAI can be a complementary service for Notion users. NotionAI is useful for drafting text, summarising, and answering queries regarding documents, notes and project files. Implementing the AI feature for Notion is probably ill advised unless Notion is being used extensively within the organisation.
For Automation
Zapier automates transferring data between different programs and apps. Zapier handles automating tasks once the task trigger (or example event) is defined. The free tiers allow up to 100 automations to be utilised, making Zapier a strong option for users looking to implement basic automation. Paid plans start at around £16.
Most small businesses would find Zapier the more user-friendly option, when compared to Make (formerly Integromat), a similar product that caters to automating more complex task flows.
Automating basic tasks, such as notifying yourself of new leads, is simple and nearly free with Zapier.
What to Actually Do First
The biggest issue is signing up for many tools in order to use them all poorly. It’s smarter to choose one tool that efficiently solves a problem related to writing, note taking, or repetitive tasks, and use it daily for a full month before adding new tools.
For most small businesses, starting with an AI writing and communication assistant is a good investment, and most businesses will see a return on their investment in less than a month. ChatGPT and Claude, with proper instructions, can save more time in one month than most tools used improperly. It’s worth mentioning that the instructions given have a large impact the quality of the response generated. Open-ended instructions, or vague instructions, can result open ended responses and useless information. On the other hand, instructions constructed with relevance and order can result in helpful responses.
Finally, Microsoft 365 Copilot is another tool worth considering if your business mainly uses Microsoft tools. It’s integrated inWord, Excel, Outlook, and Teams, so it accesses the tools most people use. The price, £25 per user per month, will likely not work for very small businesses, but for larger businesses it can be justified quickly.
The Tools to Be Sceptical About
Not all AI tools that charge a fee are actually worth their cost. Most writing tools built on top of ChatGPT charge a high monthly cost for features that are easily accessible through the core ChatGPT API at a substantially lower cost. It is also highly advised to do some research to determine if a paid tool is different and actually worth the cost.
AI image generation tools are impressive. In most cases, for small businesses, the images are either not quite right or not cost effective because of all the extra prompts and edits that are required. Most of the time, the built-in tools in Canva work much better and are easier to use.
A long list of supposedly essential AI tools is grown every week, and most of them are actually unnecessary. A better method is to start with a solution that works for one to two specific problems and build from there rather than trying to completely replace everything.