By now, it’s painfully obvious that artificial Intelligence has taken over the world. The sphere of business is no exception; in fact the finance sector is one of the main drivers of AI in today’s world. And if there’s any prediction that’s as sure as the sky is blue, it’s that the march of AI will not be stopping soon. Businesses that ride the AI wave will more than prosper. Those that don’t will not survive. Businesses owners need to look into the best AI tools for small businesses to stay ahead of the market.
It’s a common misconception though, that one needs in-depth specialised knowledge to enter the world of AI. There are incredibly simple tools that any business, especially small businesses can use. These tools help streamline business operations, enhance productivity and improve customer engagement. And what’s more, a host of them are either free, or dirt cheap.
Here, in no particular order of preference, is a list of 15 best AI tools for small businesses and how to use them.
See Also: 25 Amazing Free Google Tools For Businesses
Key Takeaways: Best AI Tools for Small Businesses
- AI is Here to Stay – Artificial intelligence is transforming industries, and businesses that embrace AI will thrive, while those that don’t may struggle to survive. The finance sector is leading the way, but AI is a game-changer across all industries.
- You Don’t Need to Be an AI Expert – Many AI tools are designed to be user-friendly and don’t require technical expertise. Small businesses can use AI for writing, customer management, accounting, design, content creation, and more.
- Cost-Effective AI Solutions – There are plenty of AI tools that are free or highly affordable, making them accessible to small businesses with limited budgets.
- Productivity & Efficiency Boost – AI tools help automate repetitive tasks, enhance customer engagement, and streamline business operations, allowing small business owners to focus on growth.
- Top AI Tools for Small Businesses – From Grammarly for writing, ChatGPT for content generation, Zoho CRM for customer management, QuickBooks for accounting, Canva for design, and Mailchimp for email marketing, there’s an AI tool for every business need.
- Scalability is Key – Start with essential AI tools and scale as your business grows. The right AI integrations can significantly improve efficiency, customer experience, and profitability.
Best AI Tools for Text
Below are AI tools small business can use to enhance text:
Grammarly
This AI powered writing assistant is all about writing. It’s an AI enabled tool that offers grammar, punctuation and style checks to ensure your communications are professional and mistake-free. Grammarly can help you write anything, from a technical paper to an ad copy. It also provides suggestions for writing inspiration, clarity and conciseness, tonality, and presentation. It’s one of the best tools out there for writing, editing and creating polished content. Best of all, it offers a free version that covers the essentials. There’s also a premium version that starts at $30/month and a business plan that enables collaboration starting at $15 per user per month.
Chat GPT/Microsoft CoPilot
ChatGPT is essentially a tool for generating human-like text. It offers customer support, content creation and editing capabilities and more. You can use ChatGPT for all kinds of tasks including drafting emails, writing articles, ideating and generating creative content, drawing up calendars, schedules and itineraries and even providing instant responses to customer interactions. It’s an incredibly valuable Swiss army knife of AI tools.
ChatGPT is basically free as it’s an offering from OpenAI which is a primarily nonprofit entity. But its collaboration with Microsoft (which birthed one of the best versions of assistant in GPT integrated Microsoft Copilot) means there’s a plus version with added features which retails currently at $20 per month. Its adaptability and versatility makes it a standout amongst the best AI tools for small businesses.
Otter.ai
Otter.ai is an AI transcription tool. It’s one of the best AI tools for businesses to use when in need of accurate transcription of speech to text. Otter AI comes in handy as an alternative to typing and for not taking during meetings and collaborations. Otter AI has a very fine-tuned speaker identification feature. It’s transcription is real-time and it is useful for summarising and keyword highlighting. This means users can capture and organise important information from meetings and conversations without added effort or distraction.
Otter.ai’s basic plan is free, with some limitations. To avoid those, small businesses may subscribe to their paid plans which start at $16.99 per user per month.
Best CRM AI Tools for Small Businesses
Below are CRM AI tools for small businesses to use:
Zoho CRM
Is your small business in need of a customer relationship management tool? Consider Zoho CRM. Zoho CRM uses AI to help businesses manage customer relationships. It organises customer data, learns customer behaviour over time, provides sales automation, analyses sales data and offers customer support features, enhancing the ability of your venture to engage with customers effectively. When it comes to customer interaction, CRM softwares are almost like a Laplace demon; they can plot the possible end of a business interaction right from the point of contact with the customer. Zoho provides predictive sales analytics, lead scoring and workflow automation. This makes it the ideal tool for streamlining sales processes and improving customer interaction.
Unlike some of the mainstream CRM tools employed by large businesses, Zoho has a free version and different tiers of pricing; ideally suited to small business with limiting budgets.
Salesforce
This is another powerful AI driven CRM solution. It offers customer relationship management data insights and sales automation, enabling small businesses grow their customer base and personalise their offerings and communications to increase brand loyalty. With Salesforce, you can predict and forecast sales data, score lead, rate conversions churn and churn and get other customer insights to help you improve your sales and customer service efforts.
Salesforce offers a 30 day free trial period after which its plans start at $25 per month.
Best Accounting AI Tools for Small Businesses
Below are some of the best AI tools small businesses can use for accounting:
QuickBooks
QuickBooks by Intuit is an AI powered accounting software. It’s the ideal tool for helping startups and small businesses manage their finances. It offers automated invoicing, spend tracking, statement analytics and financial reporting, making it one of the easiest tools to use for financial management. It provides cash flow management, budgeting, payroll, tax and other services. It’s a comprehensive solution for small businesses accounting needs.
QuickBooks is not free, but it offers a 30-day trial period after which its offerings start at $35 a month.
Here are 10 other accounting softwares to sort your business accounting concerns.
Best Design AI Tools for Small Businesses
Here are some of the best Design AI tools for small businesses:
Canva
One of the best AI tools for small businesses to solve their design needs is Canva. Canva is an AI enabled graphics editing tool that doesn’t require a whole lot of technical know-how to begin to operate. It offers a wide range of templates, fonts and generic art for designing social media posts, slide decks, business cards, logos, banners, profiles/portfolios and so on. It’s so simple, it makes design accessible to everyone. Canva’s AI features include background removal, auto resizing, design suggestions and auto-correction. With Canva, even a kid can create professional quality edits.
Canva offers a free version that covers a wide range of design needs. For businesses with even more complex needs, Canva’s paid offerings start at $14.99 for the individual plan and $29.99 per month for a team of 5.
Here’s how to use Canva.
Webflow AI
Webflow is a powerful tool worth considering for web designing purposes. It’s an AI powered design assistant that enables you create professional web pages and sites without stress. Its biggest selling points are its no code offer, intuitive interface and seamless integration with other tools including Jasper Typeform and Fluid SEO. These features make it a very powerful tool for small ventures looking to streamline their web-design and development process, leveraging the power of AI.
Webflow’s starter plan is free. Its higher plans start at $14 per month.
Best AI Tools for Content Creation
See some of the best AI tools businesses can use for content creation:
Capcut
Capcut is one of the best known AI enhanced video editors in existence. It offers a variety of AI powered features designed to simplify the video creation and editing process. It features auto-captioning, intuitive transitioning, auto reframing, video up-scaling, video stabilisation, background removal, splice locking and noise reduction. With Capcut, even a beginner can create professional quality videos with ease.
Capcut has a free version and a pro version that starts at $9.99 per month.
Jasper AI
Formerly known as Jarvis, Jasper AI is an AI content creation tool. It’s one of the best AI tools for small businesses to use in generating high quality content for blogs, social media, their websites and more, making content creation faster and seamless. It creates both written contents and images, provides templates like AIDA and PAS, brand customization analytics and team collaborations to ensure that businesses push the best messaging for their businesses out.
Jasper AI does not have a free plan but has a 7 day trial period after which subscription starts at $39 per month.
Best AI Tools for Project Management
See some of the best project management AI tools for small businesses:
Trello
Every business needs a seamless project management process, none more so than small businesses. Trello offers that. It’s a premier project management tool that uses AI to carry out task prioritisation and automation, project tracking and team collaboration. Trello’s AI capabilities include smart suggestions, automated workflows, and integration with other tools. These help teams, units and departments of small businesses stay organised, efficient and ultimately productive.
Trello offers a free plan which allows you create a workspace, add boards and collaborate. It also has premium plans starting at $5 per user per month.
Best AI Tools for Email Management
Below are some of the best AI tools for email management:
MailChimp
As a business owner, you’ll find that one of the best tools for small businesses to meet their marketing and communications needs is Mailchimp. Mailchimp is an AI powered email management platform that assists businesses enhance their email communications. It offers include audience segmentation, email personalisation and tracking performance. Its boasts of AI abilities in automating campaigns, predicting and analytics and A/B testing which small businesses can use to optimise their email marketing campaigns.
Mailchimp‘s free plan that caters to up to 500 contacts and 1000 emails every month. To unlock advance features and a higher contact limit, you have to subscribe to their paid plans starting from $13 per month.
Entrepreneurs.ng offers strategic advertising services for your small business. See how.
Best AI Tools for Social Media
Below is one of the best AI tools for social media:
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is an AI driven social media management tool. With it you can schedule posts and events, track performances, and engage your audiences efficiently. Its Ai offerings include social listening, sentiment analysis, content recommendations A/B testing and trends ranking. With Hootsuite, small businesses can take full control of their social media marketing and optimise engagements to deliver best results.
Hootsuite has a free plan but most businesses find it’s not enough to cover their needs. The paid plan starts at $99 per month, if you want to schedule more than 5 posts per month.
Best AI Tools for Analytics
Here are some of the best AI tools for Analytics that small businesses can use:
Power BI
Power BI is one of the best AI tools for small business to use for their data analytics and visualisations. It’s an AI powered business data visualisation software that offers advanced data manipulation and prediction options without needing to code. It has way more capabilities and can handle big data more effortlessly than your average spreadsheet tool. Its AI offerings include insights, natural language query, anomaly detection, forecasting, decomposition tree, natural language query and seamless integration with Azure ML.
Power Bi offers a free version that is perfect for small businesses with several useful features. To get more, you start paying at $10 per user per month.
Google Analytics
The almighty Google has an entry on this list for its size and popularity. Google analytics is an AI powered tool that helps small businesses understand their online presence and website traffic. It provides insights to user behavior and traffic sources, enabling users make data driven decisions. It also offers predictive analytics, user segmentation and automated reporting, helping businesses optimize their website performance and marketing strategies.
Google’s premium service is notoriously quite expensive at $150,000 per year. Odds are though that as a small business, the free version will serve just fine.
See Also: 12 Tech Business Ideas to Start Now as an Entrepreneur.
FAQs About AI Tools for Small Businesses
1. What are the best AI tools for small businesses?
The best AI tools for small businesses depend on your needs. Some top-rated options include Grammarly for writing, ChatGPT for content creation, Zoho CRM for customer relationship management, QuickBooks for accounting, Canva for design, and Hootsuite for social media management. These tools help automate tasks, improve efficiency, and enhance customer engagement.
2. How can AI tools help small businesses grow?
AI tools help small businesses by automating repetitive tasks, enhancing decision-making through data analytics, improving customer service with AI chatbots, and streamlining business processes. For example, AI-powered CRM software like Zoho CRM can help track customer interactions, while AI-driven marketing tools like Mailchimp can automate email campaigns for better engagement.
3. Are there free AI tools available for small businesses?
Yes! Many AI tools offer free plans or trial versions with essential features. ChatGPT, Grammarly Free, Canva Free, Zoho CRM Free Edition, and Google Analytics are great examples. While premium plans unlock more features, the free versions can still provide significant value to small businesses.
4. What is the best AI tool for automating customer service?
For automating customer service, ChatGPT, Microsoft CoPilot, and Zoho CRM AI assistant are excellent choices. These tools provide automated responses, streamline customer support, and help businesses manage customer inquiries efficiently, ensuring faster and more accurate interactions.
5. How do I choose the right AI tools for my business?
To choose the best AI tools, start by identifying your business needs—whether it’s marketing, customer service, accounting, or project management. Then, compare features, pricing, ease of use, and scalability. Many AI tools offer free trials, so you can test them before committing to a paid plan.
Conclusion
AI tools are indeed transforming the way we do business world over. By using these tools, you can improve efficiency, reduce costs and enhance customer satisfaction for and with your business. The 15 tools listed above are some of the best AI tools for small business to take their operations to the next level. Remember, the key to success with AI is to scale as demand and familiarity demands. By integrating these tools into your operations, you can remain competitive and achieve your operational goals with reduced effort. With the right approach, AI can be the key to success for your business venture.
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