How AI Can Empower Small Businesses

 

A common theme with many small business owners is that they wear one too many hats and don't usually have the luxury of delegating labor to skilled staff. From working as a marketer and product designer to accountant and HR manager, the hustle continues through a 24-hour cycle of unrelenting labor.

However, AI tools, with their ability to mimic human cognition, can take on many tasks, such as boosting customer service, cybersecurity, and marketing. The idea is to automate mundane tasks that zap your energy, freeing you up to focus on more creative and emotionally driven decisions.

AI is no longer an asset of major conglomerates with multi-billion-dollar budgets. With AI tools like Synthesys and Fireflies becoming more accessible than ever before, adopting them could be a matter of survival.

Let's take a look at how AI can empower your business, help it grow, and boost your bottom line.

Smarter, More Informed Marketing

AI is playing a crucial role in marketing, and it has become extremely efficient over the years. If you've ever received an email from an ecommerce store with a subject line that reads something along the lines of "We haven't seen you in a while" or "We miss you… come back and receive $20 off," you've seen AI in action.

From PPC to email marketing and everything in between, AI can leverage crucial data points to optimize your campaigns for superior results. For example, you could integrate your website with an email marketing platform like MailChimp. This tool lets you segregate email lists, create and send customized email campaigns, and serve your customers more efficiently.

How your customers engage with your products and services can trigger AI in the background. For example, if a customer buys a certain product or subscribes to your newsletter, a response is triggered to help guide the customer into a sale.

Those Chatbots Are Surprisingly Efficient at Customer Support

Not every business has the budget to hire a dedicated customer support team. As a business owner, you can't always address customer queries as and when they appear, which could hurt customer acquisition and sales.

It is why it's a great idea to integrate your website (or any other digital asset, such as an app) with a chatbot. Did you know that most customers prefer interacting with online chats before calling a company? You could be missing out on a potential customer if you don't answer their query on time.

With a chatbot, you can provide immediate (and relevant) responses to your customers and significantly improve customer service.

Automating Certain Human Resource Tasks

Among the more unexpected developments of AI is its ability to take on certain HR tasks that may be repetitive and time-consuming. Moreover, AI can use big data to help you make informed decisions via predictive analytics. It can significantly streamline the screening and selection process for employees, leaving you or your HR staff to focus on defining strategies.

AI can also automatically collect employee feedback to improve the hiring and onboarding process, both of which can significantly boost your bottom line.

Hiring candidates is no longer a laborious task since you can have AI crawl through thousands of applicants to find ones that closely match your criteria. This increases your likelihood of finding the best possible candidate while also saving you time and money in the process.

Finally, once you complete the hiring process, AI can guide the new employees about crucial things such as company policy and benefits. This can significantly reduce the time you spend on the hiring process and increase the number of qualified applications you receive for your job listing.

Improve Your Cybersecurity Posture

Working on your cybersecurity threats is like playing whack-a-mole in that you respond to threats only after they've reared their nasty heads.

Businesses today have a massive attack surface that can provide countless pathways and vulnerabilities to attackers. Finding and patching these vulnerabilities manually is simply not a good idea. Furthermore, recognizing a cyberattack is also easier said than done.

AI systems can churn through data to prevent a future threat and preserve your digital infrastructure and recognize when a cyberattack has been launched against you.

In the age of zero-day attacks, AI will play a crucial role in improving cybersecurity.

Social Media

AI can bolster your marketing efforts on social media platforms by generating customized content tailored to your target audience's interests and analyzing their feedback.

Social media AI has access to a treasure trove of data, such as internet user interests, preferences, and purchase habits that can help you make more informed decisions when it comes to creating targeted aids that directly address your audience's pain points.

Many small business owners have a weak or non-existent social media marketing strategy mostly because they don't have any resources to spare. AI can help automate certain aspects of social media marketing for you and help you tap into a bigger audience.

Pro Tip: Use the Right Tools

Of the thousands of AI tools that have recently popped up, choosing the right option that serves your business well can be challenging. This is why it is important to spend your time on AI tools that are useful for your specific business, whether it's social media magnum tools, email automation tools, language models, or chatbots for customer support.

Finding the right AI tools is an experimental process and depends on your specific needs. Don't be afraid to dump an AI tool you believe is not helpful to your business.

Wrapping Up - AI and Small Business in 2023

It's time to embrace AI and view them as a supporting tool instead of a threat to jobs and businesses. AI is extremely adept at processing and analyzing data at a faster rate than humans.

You can optimize your daily tasks through automated workflows and boost your productivity. It would allow employees to reduce the time they spend on completing a task and work more efficiently and quickly.