How to Use AI in Your Business: 5 Applications and Expert Tips (2026)

In 2026, using AI in your business is table stakes. According to McKinsey & Company’s The State of AI in 2025, 88% of organizations regularly use artificial intelligence (AI) in at least one business function. 

With AI capabilities now meeting or exceeding several human intelligence benchmarks—from PhD-level science questions to competition-level math—the potential for productivity gains is real. Stanford’s 2026 Artificial Intelligence Index Report documents productivity gains of 14% to 15% in customer support, 26% in software development, and up to 50% in marketing output. 

Here’s where you can apply AI to your business, with steps for getting started and tools to consider. 

How to use AI in your business

Content creation

AI content creation can help you plan, generate, and adapt content for different use cases. For example, AI can use a single video to generate social media posts, email newsletters, website copy, and ad scripts for platforms like email or TikTok. The key is to provide your generative AI tool with strong example material, such as past content that performed well—then ask the AI to generate variations or new ideas. 

Muammar Reed, cofounder of MiJa Books, puts his video captions into ChatGPT or Claude and asks for newsletters and carousel posts. 

“It’s your authentic voice because it’s trained off your video and your content,” says Muammar on an episode of Shopify Masters. He suggests using prompts like these:

• “Make this carousel post for me.”

• “Make this into a newsletter.” 

• “These are three videos that are performing the best on ads. Can you change the hook a little bit?”

• “Let’s film three or four more videos—give me scripts that relate to that.” 

Here are AI-powered tools to consider:

Andrew Faris, founder and CEO of AJF Growth, uses Claude to generate explainer videos scripts and cut down longer scripts for different social media formats, he says on Shopify Masters. He then runs the scripts through ElevenLabs to generate voice-overs. 

At Manscaped, the content team starts with an internal large language model (LLM) developed to generate content using five virtual actors, driven by natural language prompts. 

“It can be difficult for AI models to get products right in content,” says Paul Tran, Manscaped’s CEO and founder, on Shopify Masters. He suggests taking the time to train your model of choice on how to highlight your product. Manscaped built 26 versions of its internal model, improving how its product appeared each time.

Despite these capabilities, AI isn’t a replacement for human intelligence. “We haven’t quite gotten to where AI can generate an ad completely,” Andrew says. Treat it as a creative partner that smooths friction throughout the process, not a fully autonomous one. And AI can still produce “hallucinations”; review every draft carefully.

Customer service 

When applying AI to customer service, you have a couple of options. You can use AI chatbots and assistants to answer basic questions and loop in human agents for more complex cases. Or, AI agents can independently plan and carry out multistep tasks rather than responding to one prompt at a time. 

Conversational AI assistants can help human agents resolve 15% more issues per hour than those who don’t use AI assistance. 

Sean Frank, founder of accessories brand Ridge, says that the company uses AI to handle over 60% of its simple support tickets and routes complex issues to its human team. As a result, he says on an episode of Shopify Masters, Ridge’s Net Promoter Score (NPS) has climbed from around 90 to between 95 and 97—near perfect.

Here are AI solutions to consider: 

• Shopify Inbox. A live chat and messaging app that can help automate routine customer communications.

• SmartBot. An AI chatbot that learns your products and policies to answer shoppers.

• Juphy. An AI assistant that handles product questions and support across your store and social channels. 

AI agents offer more comprehensive support. Agentic AI goes beyond answering a simple FAQ about a return to also initiate a return and issue the refund. 

“An agent is a purpose-specific configuration of AI,” says Alex Pilon, Shopify developer and AI advocate. “You have a system that is tuned for a particular task or workflow, and then the agent can be configured to interact with databases, allowing us to create highly specialized agents.”

The clearer the boundaries you give an agent, the more capable it is in a given context, says Alex. To improve AI customer experience, always set guardrails that compel agents to route sensitive cases to a human. For example, you might tell the agent to send any refund above a set dollar amount—or any message where a customer signals frustration—to a human.

Here are agentic customer service AI tools to consider:

• Gorgias. This customer service helpdesk uses an AI agent to resolve order tracking and returns directly in Shopify. 

• Richpanel. These AI agents resolve order, return, refund, and subscription tickets end to end. 

• Supportify. An AI support agent that can cancel orders, track shipments, and create return labels. 

• EcoReturns. Returns-specific agent automates the entire return process.

Website and app development

AI can help you create a website from the ground up with little to no coding experience. It’s often called “vibe coding”—building software by describing what you want in plain language as AI handles the underlying code. This means non-engineers can build a functional website, storefront, or app through conversational instructions.

“The idea of coding is always about taking some idea and then figuring out exactly what needs to happen in order for that to come to fruition,” says Alex of Shopify. “With vibe coding, the idea can be a real thing in a matter of seconds.”

Start by creating a simple sitemap and brand guidelines. These help you write detailed prompts: Shopify’s AI Store Builder, for instance, creates a custom theme from a description of your business and products. (The same principle applies to feeding your material into most models.) From there, refine individual sections. In Shopify’s tool, you can generate blocks, like a heading, image, or button, by describing what you want.

The same process applies to vibe coding apps. Some are full-stack app builders, like Lovable. These browser-based tools can fully generate a working app, from the visual front end to behind-the-scenes logic. Others are terminal-based AI coding assistants, like Claude Code, which runs on command lines and plugs into Shopify through the AI Toolkit.

As with any app or website, testing is key. Shopify SimGym, available as an AI Research Preview, is a simulator for your store. It runs AI shoppers through your storefront, then reports navigation patterns and average cart value. You can A/B test themes to see which performs best and get recommendations before customers interact with your site. 

Here’s a bit more on each tool:

• Shopify AI Store Builder. An automated store builder that generates a custom theme from conversational description of your brand and vision for your site. 

• Lovable. A browser-based AI app builder generates full-stack web apps from conversational prompts.

• Claude Code. A terminal-based AI coding assistant that can write, edit, and test code based on plain-language prompts.

• Shopify AI Toolkit. An open-source plug-in that connects coding assistants like Claude Code, Cursor, and Gemini CLI directly to Shopify’s documentation. 

• Shopify Sidekick. Shopify’s AI assistant writes and refines copy from natural-language prompts. 

• Shopify SimGym. This tool runs AI shoppers through your storefront to simulate how real buyers navigate it, then reports back on performance and friction points. 

Market research and competitor analysis

Market research means gathering information about your customers, competitors, and industry to gain a competitive advantage. AI speeds up this traditionally manual work. Tools with research modes compile public data on competitor pricing, positioning, and market trends. 

Here are AI market research and competitor tools to consider:

• Shopify Sidekick. Shopify’s built-in AI assistant answers questions about store data and surfaces trends.

• ChatGPT or Claude. All-purpose tools with research modes—Deep Research and Research, respectively—that compile public market data and return a report that cites its sources. Always click through and confirm each claim.

To start, give your AI tool of choice information to research, including:

Ask it to compare pricing, positioning, and assortment—or ask, “What can you tell me?”—to yield a competitive overview you can use to better understand and refine your market positioning. 

Andrew uses OpenAI’s Deep Research to generate a multipage report on target markets in minutes. “You’ll learn who your most likely customers are, who tends to shop in this category, and how you’re priced compared to your competitors,” he says.

Always verify the output, as AI is known to invent figures. Another pitfall is treating the report as final. Use it to direct your own analysis instead.

Operations and data analysis

Operations and data analysis work—sorting transactions, reconciling sales and expenses, flagging outlying inventory changes—can be repetitive, with room for human error. AI can summarize changes or anomalies in your bookkeeping data, freeing you from rote data entry so you can focus on decision-making. 

One clear application is spending analysis. To get started, upload datasets or profit-and-loss (P&L) statements into tools like ChatGPT. Simply asking, “What jumps off the page?” or “What do you notice?” can yield useful feedback like where you’re over- or underspending, says Andrew. 

Here are AI tools to consider to improve your operational efficiency:

• Shopify Sidekick. A low-lift starting point that answers questions about your store’s performance and highlights trends directly within your admin tools.

• Shopify Flow. Offers free workflow automation for rules-based tasks like tagging orders or flagging low stock.

• Microsoft Copilot or Gemini. Used with Excel or Sheets, respectively, these tools can help analyze and chart your data within existing spreadsheets. 

Think critically about the results AI surfaces, and verify any figure it flags against the source data before acting on it. The reports should act as leads, pointing you toward anomalies worth investigating.

Key considerations for AI implementation in your business

Here are some key considerations when implementing AI in your business.

Optimize for AI systems 

Looking ahead, Paul of Manscaped predicts that as AI gets smarter, brands will need to focus on generative engine optimization (GEO) to ensure their products are recommended when consumers ask AI-powered chatbots for product recommendations. The same way search engine optimization (SEO) shapes how you rank in search engine results, GEO shapes how your brand shows up in AI-generated answers.

Rather than focusing on keywords, AI platform optimization prioritizes structured data and real customer sentiment over gamed signals, says Paul. “LLMs amass so much data—aggregating reviews from multiple data sources—that it’s impossible to spoof it,” he says. “You’ll need to develop really great products to rank organically.” 

To optimize your store for AI, write product pages for both humans and AI. This means adding detailed specifications, comparisons to similar products, and including content like sizing guides and care instructions. 

On Shopify, you can do this directly through the Knowledge Base app, which lets you publish AI-readable FAQs and structure your product information for AI search engines. 

Train your team

According to Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Index Report, knowledge and training gaps are the most frequently cited obstacle to implementing responsible AI, with 59% of organizations citing them as an issue. 

AI tools only deliver when your team uses them efficiently and consistently. Lauren Gropper, founder and CEO of sustainable tableware brand Repurpose, hired third-party Chat Walrus to train her company on ChatGPT. This gave everyone a shared vocabulary.

“Now, the whole team is aware of how to use the tools to create new, interesting marketing campaign assets,” Lauren says on Shopify Masters. “We use it across all of our work to implement standardized procedures.” 

For a small business, that might mean one training session and a shared log of prompts. 

Structure your data for AI tools 

AI output depends on the quality of your input. If your product information is inconsistent or your records are incomplete, the results will reflect those gaps. This matters most for AI personal shoppers and virtual shopping assistants, which don’t browse your store data the way people do. They read structured, machine-readable fields like title, price, and dimensions. 

Label your data so machine learning algorithms can parse it using ecommerce schema markup—code that spells out each product’s price, availability, and attributes. This schema pushes your catalog to Google Merchant Center, the free hub where Google stores your product data, and, ultimately, Google’s AI shopping surfaces.

Names matter too. To make sure your product answers shoppers’ questions, give each item a descriptive, specific title. “Insulated 32-ounce stainless steel water bottle, leakproof lid” tells an AI assistant far more than a creative name like “mountain top flask.” Prioritize concrete details over vague descriptions like “next-level convenience.”

On Shopify, Catalog builds these structured fields for you automatically. A free readiness check tells you whether your data let AI assistants find your listing. That makes it easier for tools like Shop’s AI Shopping Assistant, which uses conversational search, to accurately recommend products to shoppers.