Small and medium-sized enterprises account for 90% of the global industry, generating almost half of the global GDP, but still … more
Small businesses aren't that small. In fact, they make up about 90% of the industry and generate nearly 50% of the world's GDP.
This means that superscale giants like Amazon and Google may make headlines for the development and sales of AI tools, but in many cases they are a global network of innovators, entrepreneurs and dreamers running small businesses that create real value with these tools.
If that's yours, AI can help with many of the heavy lifting that comes with marketing, management, compliance, customer service and more.
So here is a summary of some of the best AI tools I've come across. These tools make it easier for business owners, sole traders, or self-employed merchants to take part in the AI revolution.
The best five
Adobe Express
Express is like a cut-down version of the Adobe suite, full of productivity tools, powered by Genai and Adobe's proprietary Firefly AI engines. It is primarily intended to help you create marketing materials and assets, including videos. An important selling point for Adobe's Genai offering is that it is fully trained on the data that Adobe actually owns, creating issues that could emerge more with regulatory changes over AI and copyrighted works.
Description
It's probably the easiest way to start creating and editing video content for business marketing, with the ability to create, cut and rearrange videos simply by editing the transcript. Generated AI is used for automatic transcription as well as powerful features such as overdubbing using cloned AI narration, virtual green screen background, removal of filler words, and “URMS” and “ERRS” for clumsy sounds from recorded audio. A great tool that can significantly reduce the cost and needs of technical expertise when creating business videos.
Freshdesk Freddy AI Copilot
AI Help Desk Agents can take actions such as answering customer questions, escalating human interventions when necessary, issuing refunds, and more. Customer service is becoming one of the hot use cases for generating AI, providing 24/7 help and becoming more efficient as you learn about common issues with customers. Freddie analyzes customer communication sentiment and drafts knowledge-based articles and FAQs. A fresh desk with a new SME-friendly service level and price range
Salesforce Agentforce Assistant
Customer data holds all sorts of clues to your business success. Let's talk to it and think about whether we can ask questions. Well, that's the idea behind Salesforce's Genai CRM assistant, formerly known as Einstein Copilot, but is now part of the AgentForce Agent AI suite. Dive into customer data, answer detailed questions and identify new business opportunities. Agent Force Assistant can also acquire a wealth of domain-specific knowledge that Salesforce has gained over the years, create sales emails, intelligently update and track customer records, and generate follow-up tasks.
Microsoft 365 Copilot
What makes this great is the addition of AI support to popular office tools that have long been the backbone of small business productivity. Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and teams are profiting from the integration of Copilot. This means that from creating email and web copies to creating presentations and analyzing your data, you can manage it with automated, natural language prompts. For example, in Excel, Copilot can recommend formulas, create visualizations, and spot trends in business and customer data. PowerPoint lets you design slide decks and team conversations, summarise collaboration and meetings, and automatically generate action points and workflow schedules. More advanced AI users can also use it to build autonomous agents that can provide complex workflows with minimal human intervention using Copilot Studio.
A more amazing small business generation AI tool
If all the boxes you need are not checked, take a look at some of these options.
buffer
Buffer is designed to help small businesses build social audiences and uses a generous free tier that provides access to AI assistant capabilities.
Canva Magic Studio
Create everything from branded social media graphics to simple prompts to animated marketing videos.
grammar
What's great about this Genai Grammar and Writing tool is that it integrates with almost everything from Word to web browsers. This means that advice and content suggestions are available through all tools.
jasper
A copywriting tool optimized for copying business marketing and blogging.
LiveChat
Set up and run an automated chatbot to discuss with website visitors and convert them to subscribers or customers.
MailChimp
Email marketing is a great way to get your business aware and start generating repeat customers, and MailChimp's generative AI capabilities allow you to not only automate your processes, but also quickly generate branded, optimized content for your campaigns.
Monday
Monday is a project management and collaboration platform that now allows you to chat in real time to gain live insights into your projects and workflows.
Otter
Otter is an automated meeting assistant who takes notes, creates summary and provides action plans by analyzing chatter during online meetings with teams or clients.
Sage
The popular self-service accounting package allows business owners to automate their invoices and payments. You can also answer bookkeeping questions and use natural language to provide insights about cash flow.
Shopify Sidekick
Millions of businesses use the Shopify platform to simplify e-commerce operations, and the new built-in Sidekick AI assistant helps with day-to-day tasks such as creating product descriptions and in-depth analysis of business insights.
Tableau Pulse
Thanks to AI, even small organizations can benefit from data analysis and the insights that it can surface. Pulse is a simplified AI-powered version of a popular data analytics platform, tailored to small businesses and designed to be accessible to anyone, not just data science experts.
SPROUT SOCON
Who needs a dedicated social media manager? Sprout Social helps businesses to surface trends with automated social listening and insights, then quickly draft sophisticated and effective posts.
Tidio
Create and deploy automated sales and customer service agents.
WIX AI Website Builder
Often the first step to getting your business off the ground is a great website, and the DIY platform WIX features an AI assistant bot that builds it from a simple prompt.
xero
Another accounting package with AI that has just launched a new low-priced plan tailored for small business owners and only traders who want to start AI.
The AI revolution is not just about large companies with large budgets. Today, small business owners embracing these tools will find themselves increasingly better positioned to compete, scale and thrive in the digital market. Whether you are the only trader trying to automate your first customer service bot or an entrepreneur ready to change the entire workflow, the future of successful SMEs is to make AI a valuable team member.
