If you’re not leveraging AI in your business yet, you’re already falling behind. As a small business owner, you’ve probably heard and read this a hundred times at least. While that might be frustrating, the truth is that AI is here to stay, and businesses – whether big or small – should adapt to AI to stay competitive.
When it comes to small businesses, in particular, AI can truly be a game-changer. Why? Because as a small business leader, you’re most probably stretched for resources, with your team members having to wear multiple hats and perform numerous functions – all while operating under tight budgets.
But AI can actually help you automate, streamline, and improve many processes and operations. From customer support, lead management, and content creation to sales and marketing automation – AI can help you do more with less.
Luckily, there are plenty of AI tools that are affordable for small business owners. In this blog, we’ve compiled a list of the best AI tools across different categories that are incredibly helpful for small businesses. Let’s get straight to it.
Best AI Tools for Small Businesses and How Using Them Can Improve Your Operations
Best AI-powered customer service software for small businesses
1. VoiceSpin AI Messaging
AI Messaging by VoiceSpin is an omnichannel contact center platform that allows you to integrate multiple digital communication channels (including email, live chat, social media, WhatsApp, and other instant messaging apps) and handle customer interactions across all touchpoints from one unified inbox. With AI Messaging, you can easily label conversations to keep them better organized, leave private notes for other team members, create automation rules, and manage proactive campaigns.
You can also integrate an AI chatbot and train it to answer your customers’ questions 24/7 when your reps are not available and take advantage of other AI-powered features like AI reply suggestions and AI conversation summaries.
Key features:
- AI chatbot integration
- AI reply suggestions
- Conversation labels and notes
- AI conversation summary
- Automation rules
- Campaign management
- Performance reports
- Google Translate integration
2. Help Scout
Help Scout is a great helpdesk platform for growing companies looking to support their customers across email, live chat, and social media channels from one shared inbox. It comes with a rich feature set, including conversation tags and custom fields to help you better organize and track issues, saved replies, internal notes, and more. In addition, Help Scout has several AI-powered features, including an AI conversation summary, AI-generated reply drafts, and AI assist that can help you improve your responses.
What’s distinctive about Help Scout is that it also offers a knowledge base builder that enables you to publish a customized help center that contains answers to FAQs to help your customers get answers on their own, reducing your support volume.
Key features:
- Saved replies and AI drafts
- Conversation tags and custom fields
- AI assist
- Reporting tools
- AI conversation summary
- Knowledge builder
- Custom workflows
- Integrations with third-party apps
3. Zendesk
Zendesk is a well-known helpdesk ticketing system built for both small businesses and enterprises. It is, in fact, one of the pioneers in the helpdesk space. Zendesk allows you to support customers across multiple channels, including email, live chat, social media, messaging, and voice, enabling your team to deliver omnichannel experiences. What’s great about Zendesk is that it offers a special plan for qualified startups that provides unlimited access to all Zendesk products for free for six months.
With Zendesk, you can also integrate AI-powered chatbots (AI Agents) that can resolve your customers’ issues and help you reach 80% automation across every channel. Additionally, it offers impressive integration options with third-party tools.
Key features:
- Predefined responses
- Automatic translation
- Custom business rules
- Help center
- Knowledge management
- Prebuilt analytics dashboard
- AI-powered chatbots
- Third-party integrations
Best AI-powered CRM systems for small businesses
4. HubSpot
HubSpot is one of the most popular Customer Relationship Management systems out there. HubSpot’s Starter plan is a truly great fit for small businesses and growing startups. It includes HubSpot’s core products and features for sales, marketing, and customer service and a range of automation and AI-powered features like AI website builder, AI content creator, AI conversational chatbots, and more.
Better yet, HubSpot offers a free plan, which is an excellent starting point for SMBs, covering the essentials for managing customer relationships, automating marketing campaigns, and keeping track of customer support interactions.
Key features:
- List segmentation
- Contact management
- Email automation
- Deal pipeline
- AI content writer
- AI conversational chatbots
- Reporting dashboard
- Integrations with third-party apps
5. Pipedrive
Pipedrive is known for being a very intuitive CRM system that is easy to set up and operate. It is also specifically designed for sales teams, with a range of features like lead and pipeline management, deal routing, products catalog, email automations, and a lot more to help businesses manage deals and sales activities and automate the entire sales process. In addition, Pipedrive has a rich integration library with third-party apps.
Beyond basic features, Pipedrive offers a number of AI-powered tools, including AI Sales Assistant, AI app recommendations, AI email generator, and AI email summarization. For example, an AI Sales Assistant can help your sales reps identify the hottest leads who are most likely to convert and provide next-step recommendations to help you boost conversions.
Key features:
- Lead and deal management
- Customizable pipelines
- Automations builder
- People and organization management
- Communication tracking
- AI-powered Sales Assistant
- Visual dashboards
- 500+ integrations with third-party apps
Best AI content and image creation tools for small businesses
6. ChatGPT
ChatGPT is one of the best free AI tools small businesses can use. At its core, ChatGPT is an advanced conversational AI language model that you can interact with through a chat-based interface. And you can literally use it for anything from idea generation and content creation to customer support and data analysis. As a small business owner, you can use it to generate product descriptions, email campaigns, social media posts, and proposal drafts, to name just a few examples.
In addition to content creation, ChatGPT can help you in your sales and marketing efforts by recommending the best lead generation strategies. All in all, it can act as a personal assistant, helping you streamline your business operations.
Key features:
- Brainstorming and ideation
- Ability to engage in open-ended dialogue
- Writing and editing assistance
- Text summarization and paraphrasing
- Language translation (multiple languages)
- Providing analysis and insights
- Customizable tone
- Contextual awareness and knowledge retention
7. Grammarly
Grammarly is another great AI tool, serving as an AI-powered writing assistant that automates the process of proofreading and editing written content. It offers you real-time grammar, spelling, and punctuation corrections, helping you ensure that your copy is clean and grammatically correct. Grammarly can also provide suggestions on how to improve your content for better clarity and make the writing follow specific styles and tones.
While we’ll admit the tool isn’t perfect (at least yet), it’s still one of the best grammar checkers on the market today. Besides, it seamlessly integrates with other platforms and tools like Microsoft Word, email clients, Google Docs, and web browsers via extensions.
Key features:
- Real-time grammar and spelling checks
- Punctuation correction
- Style and tone suggestions
- Vocabulary enhancements
- Clarity and conciseness improvements
- AI-powered writing suggestions
- Plagiarism checker
- AI content detection
8. Canva
Canva is an AI-powered graphic design platform that allows businesses to create all kinds of professional-looking graphics, marketing materials, and presentations. And the best part is that you don’t need to have advanced design skills for that. Its intuitive, user-friendly interface, extensive library of ready-made templates (including free ones), powerful design tools, and affordable pricing make it an excellent solution for SMBs.
Canva’s paid versions give you unlimited access to 100 million+ photos, videos, fonts, and templates, advanced productivity tools like background remover and brand kit creator as well as a set of AI-powered features. Plus, you get access to team collaboration features, enabling your teams to collaborate on projects in real time.
Key features:
- Drag-and-drop interface
- Rich template library
- Curved text generator
- AI photo enhancer
- Animation and video editing
- AI image creation
- Team collaboration tools
- PDF converter
Best AI marketing automation tools for small businesses
9. Klaviyo
Klaviyo is a powerful automation platform for email marketing and SMS built specifically for e-commerce businesses. It is known for its advanced segmentation, automation, and integration capabilities that allow you to use customer data to send highly targeted and personalized messages. It also has a free version with basic features for those who want to try out the platform before committing to a paid plan.
What sets Klaviyo apart from its competitors is that it offers a truly impressive set of AI-driven features and tools. These include personalized product recommendations, predictive analytics, AI-based segmentation, email content generation, smart send time optimization, dynamic content personalization, A/B testing optimization, customer churn prediction, and a lot more.
Key features:
- Customized email, SMS, and push flows
- Hyper-precise segmentation
- Drag-and-drop automation builder
- Templates with built-in best practices
- Personalized product recommendations
- Reporting and benchmarks
- Klaviyo AI (a set of AI-powered features)
- 350+ prebuilt integrations with third-party apps
10. Buffer
Buffer is a popular social media management platform for small and mid-sized businesses that helps you write, schedule, and publish social media posts content across your integrated channels. Buffer’s key feature is its ability to schedule posts across various social media platforms. It also provides advanced analytics tools that allow you to track your social media performance through weekly or monthly reports.
What prompted us to add Buffer to this list of AI solutions for small businesses is its AI Assistant. With the Buffer AI assistant, you can generate a wide range of ideas for your social media posts, including industry-specific topics, current events, prompts for quotes, and a lot more. And what’s remarkable is that the AI Assistant is currently available to users across all plans, including the free one.
Key features:
- Planning and publishing tools
- Tailored posts for each channel
- Landing page builder
- AI Assistant
- Engagement tools
- Draft collaboration tools
- Analytics reports
- 30+ third-party integrations
Best AI project management and team collaboration tools for small businesses
11. Asana
Asana is a project management and team collaboration tool that helps teams organize tasks effectively, track progress, and collaborate on projects. It comes with a rich set of features, including task lists, project dashboards, unlimited messages and file storage, time tracking, reporting capabilities, and more. On top of that, Asana offers a free plan for small teams that allows you to collaborate with up to 10 teammates.
While the free plan doesn’t include any AI features, paid plans offer multiple AI-powered tools and capabilities. These include AI workflow automations, AI-powered task assignment, task prioritization, smart recommendations on specific actions (like adding collaborators, linking related tasks, or setting task deadlines), etc.
Key features:
- Team collaboration
- Unlimited tasks, projects, and messages
- Unlimited file storage
- Search filters
- List, board, and calendar view
- Asana AI
- Workflow builder
- 100+ free integrations with third-party apps
12. Notion
Notion is a digital workspace that you can use to organize your workload, manage notes, tasks, projects, and calendar, run collaborative projects, share knowledge, manage teams, and do so much more in a single, flexible interface. No wonder the tool is widely used by small businesses, startups, and remote teams to create custom workflows tailored to their unique needs. Notion integrates with Slack, Google Analytics, Zapier, and other tools. Alternatively, you can integrate it with custom tools through a public API.
You can get started with Notion for free, but AI features only come as a paid addition. Notion AI allows you to generate and edit text in any document, autofill databases with summaries and insights, and quickly find relevant notes, tasks, or documents using AI-powered search.
Key features:
- Collaborative workspace
- Custom automations
- Unlimited published pages
- Task management
- Basic and advanced page analytics
- AI text generation and editing
- Database autofilling
- Integrations with Slack, Zapier, and other tools
13. Trello
Trello is a visual collaboration and AI project management tool for small businesses. Though it’s commonly used by software development teams, other departments like marketing, sales, and support can also benefit from using it. Trello offers digital boards, lists, and cards, making it easy for team members to organize tasks, collaborate on projects, and track progress. And the fact that you can get started for free with a bunch of features and capabilities makes it an excellent tool for small businesses.
Trello is also known for its AI capabilities (though these are not included in the free version), such as AI-driven content generation, grammar correction, summarization, brainstorming, and other features to help teams work even more efficiently.
Key features:
- Unlimited cards
- Unlimited activity logs
- Built-in automation
- A rich templates library
- Unlimited workspace collaborators
- Unlimited boards
- Advanced checklists
- AI content generation
How Integrating AI Tools Helps Small Business Teams Work Smarter
AI-driven solutions we’ve listed here are just a few examples of how AI can help small businesses operate faster, smarter, and more effectively while optimizing many processes in a cost-efficient way. Let’s summarize the key benefits below:
Automation of repetitive tasks
First and foremost, AI-powered tools help small business teams automate many routine tasks and processes that would otherwise have to be done manually. That may include nearly anything from data entry, content creation, customer support, order confirmations, lead prioritization, email marketing campaigns, follow-up communications, and so much more. That can save your team hours of time and free them up to focus on higher-value tasks and activities. Ultimately, it makes your team more productive and efficient.
24/7 customer support availability
Regardless of the industry, today’s consumers want quick and efficient support. According to Salesforce, 77% of customers expect to interact with someone immediately when they contact a company. While you’re not always able to respond to your customer requests right on the spot, integrating an AI-powered chatbot can be that perfect solution.
AI chatbots use Natural Language Processing (NLP) to understand human language and respond in a natural way, helping your customers get answers to their questions and resolve issues around the clock without having to call your support line. Better yet, AI chatbots can learn from past interactions through machine learning algorithms and improve the accuracy and relevance of responses over time.
Recommended reading: 7 Ways to Automate Your Customer Service and How AI Can Help
Automated creation of content and visuals
Having high-quality copy and visuals is essential for small businesses to build trust with the audience, engage potential customers, and simply differentiate from the competition. And tools like ChatGPT, Jasper, Grammarly, Copy.ai, and dozens more can help you generate content aligned with your brand voice in a range of formats, including website copy, headlines, product descriptions, emails, social media posts, video scripts, and more. While we don’t recommend using AI for long-form copy, AI tools can be valuable for generating short-form copy or simply brainstorming to help you in your content creation process.
Similarly, AI image generation tools like Canva, Gemini, DALL·E 3 can help you create images, visuals, graphics, animations, or even videos based on your inputs and guidelines in a matter of seconds.
Improved sales and marketing strategies
In terms of marketing and sales automation, AI tools can truly make a difference for small businesses, helping them compete with larger companies. Here are some more specific examples of how AI can help SMBs in nearly every stage of their sales and marketing funnel:
- AI can analyze customer data and help you identify the ideal audience and build your ICP (ideal customer profile).
- AI tools can generate and qualify leads through proactive web forms and chatbots.
- AI can automatically score leads based on past behavior and help you better prioritize them.
- AI-powered solutions can help you create personalized email campaigns and analyze campaign performance.
- AI can generate personalized product recommendations to help you increase conversions.
- AI tools can schedule posts across your social media channels, analyze engagement metrics, and suggest optimal times for posting.
- AI can identify customers who are about to churn and suggest actions to retain them.
Better team collaboration and alignment
Lastly, AI-powered tools can foster better team collaboration and ensure everyone on your team is aligned on shared goals and tasks. This is especially important for small business teams that operate remotely. For example, tools like Notion and Confluence can help you organize and categorize company knowledge and resources automatically, while project management and collaboration platforms like Asana and Trello can help you assign and prioritize tasks and visualize workflows.
Wrapping up
Gone are the days when AI was only for tech giants. AI is becoming more and more accessible – and it’s time for small businesses to fully take advantage of it. Fortunately, there are hundreds of AI-based tools out there that are just right for small businesses, and they don’t cost a fortune, making it easier than ever for SMBs to get started with AI. When used strategically, AI solutions can help small business owners automate numerous tasks, processes, and operations, drive better efficiency, and generate more revenue.
If you’re looking to automate your customer service operations, VoiceSpin’s AI Messaging might be just what you need. It allows you to integrate multiple communication channels (including email, live chat, and WhatsApp) into a single omnichannel platform and support your customers across channels using one app. Better still, by integrating an AI chatbot, you can make it easy for your customers to resolve issues 24/7, even when you can’t answer immediately.
Book a demo call now to learn more about VoiceSpin’s AI contact center solutions and how you can leverage them for customer service automation.
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