AI has proven to be a useful tool for many business owners in various ways. From drafting ideas to getting you to the end product, Artificial Intelligence can help you access knowledge, provide insights and even generate content.
How to use AI correctly as a business owner
We’ve all seen AI-generated ads that pretty much look the same, in a very obvious way. As a result, a lot of people underestimate the value it can provide, when used correctly. You as a business owner, or other professionals, such as your creative team, still have to be at the centre of the process. A real person is the one who sparks the first conversation, and more importantly, a real person needs to validate the outcome. Only you can make sure that what AI has produced aligns with your brand, adheres to your tone of voice and represents what you want to convey. Blindly accepting and using the end product of AI leads to the AI slop we see everywhere. And there’s a lot of it out there; we don’t need to add to it.
Here is a trick most business owners are not aware of, and what’s going to help you get a consistent outcome from your AI tools. Some of the most popular tools are ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, and in all of them, there’s an extra step you need to take before you even start typing your first prompt. Take a moment to write down your brand guidelines, your tone of voice, who you think your audience is, what you want to convey to them and more importantly describe your business, who you are and what you do.
This will help AI understand more about you, and produce end results that are more likely to suit your needs from the first drafts. If you only take one thing from this article, this is it! You can stop reading now.
If you do want to learn more, however, let’s now look at the top 8 ways AI can help your business in more detail and how to maximise its benefits.
How can AI be used in small businesses? Top 8 ways to use AI as a means to boost your productivity.
1. Customer service
We will start with the obvious stuff. Chatbots are everywhere, and customers are now expecting faster responses online. There are many platforms out there to pick from. Providing those tools with your brand guidelines and tone of voice will help them make your customers feel like they’re interacting with your company, instead of a generic chatbot.
2. Analyse and manage your finances
AI tools are extremely good at handling the boring and repeatable admin tasks none of us wants to do. Google’s NotebookLM is a great tool for analysing and managing your finances, for example. It uses financial documents you upload to it, like your monthly sales report, POS data, as well as your expense invoices. It will generate a summary of your business’s performance that you can share with people. From there, you can ask questions about your business finances and get answers specific to you.
3. Employee resource hub
This is one of my favourites. If you are in the privileged position to employ people, you know that staff turnover is a real pain. You want to make sure everybody starts already knowing your policies and procedures. This way, onboarding new employees is easier for everyone: the new person has confidence they know what to expect, and the staff already with you know the new hire's been well prepared. We can use Google’s NotebookLM here, once again, to upload documents we think are relevant, like policies and procedures, dress code, safety guidelines etc. That’s it. Meet your new HR department! You can now share this with new employees, and they can ask questions directly in NotebookLM to get clear and specific answers.
4. Social media post ideas
You knew this was coming. It’s one of the most popular ways businesses use AI tools. Notice, however, the last word of the title: ideas! An AI tool that has access to your brand’s guidelines and a clear context of what you do can give you great ideas for posts that will indeed help drive user interaction up. It’s important to understand that AI doesn’t replace creative (or any kind for that matter) professionals but rather helps in other ways, it unblocks you from a creative drought, gets you quickly from an idea to a first draft, and it’s especially good at helping you scale to multiple social platforms, or schedule and publish your posts.
5. Idea to first drafts and POCs
Very similar to the previous section, this is simply a reminder that the same is true for bouncing any sort of ideas with AI. Generating a quick Proof of Concept (POC) will make it easier to see if your big idea actually has any chance of working, without costing you money and time in the odd case that it doesn’t, because let’s face it, you’re a genius. I personally use this a lot. Developers are known for having crazy app ideas that go off to build only to end up with a worse version of something that’s already out there doing great. A sense check before I go off to build the new social platform for cats saves me a lot of time.
6. Meeting notes to useful follow-ups
Most online call tools offer automated meeting notes or transcriptions. Turning those into useful follow-ups is often a task that takes a good chunk of your time after the call, making the meeting time last longer for you. Feeding those notes into an AI tool, you can ask it to generate things like a bullet-point list of what was agreed in the call, or a follow-up email mentioning those points to the other party to confirm next actions. You can ask for a list of agreed action items, a project brief, or even social post ideas.
7. Business analytics
We are getting to the real step-up now: what will truly help you level up as a business owner. A lot of business owners rarely look at their analytics. And when they do, it’s usually sales performance, or website traffic. And even when people do check on their analytics, using them efficiently is a whole different beast. This is where AI can help you parse those numbers and provide you with insights that you’d otherwise have to spend money to get from an enterprise-level analytics expert agency. They can highlight trends, user behaviour patterns, what’s working and what’s not.
8. Data-driven decisions
This is the natural step from the previous section, and ties a lot of the previous sections together. What do you do with all that data? An AI tool that has access to your analytics, your financial documents, and your brand guidelines can help you make decisions based on real user data, rather than guessing what might work, and spending money to figure it out through trial and error. Being able to make informed decisions is something you’d have to pay a lot of money for before AI.
As I’ve mentioned quite a few times throughout this article, AI is not going to replace marketing professionals, or magically turn you into one. When you reach a certain level of growth, your business will still need a professional to turn that data, and even those AI insights, (why not?) into winning marketing campaigns, or an industry consultant to tell you how to scale correctly and how to avoid certain traps. Using an AI tool, however, might postpone the need for a third-party agency, and provide you with some knowledge on things that, let’s face it, you didn’t even want to spend hours learning about in your early days when you have to do everything by yourself.
If you do find yourself in need of someone to help you start with AI, however, I’d be more than happy to see if I can help you. Drop me a message and we’ll take it from there!