How to Use AI for Small Business

Save Time, Cut Costs, and Boost Productivity

Table of Contents

Key Areas Where Small Businesses Can Use AI?
Key Benefits of AI for Small Businesses
How to Choose the Right AI Tool for Your Business
Introducing Orderry: AI-Powered Business Automation
Final Thoughts

Key Areas Where Small Businesses Can Use AI?

Finding a suitable AI tool for your small business comes down to its needs and daily activities. So, here is how AI can help small businesses streamline their workflows:

Task and Meeting Scheduling

Task scheduling is an area where AI can streamline your SMB’s daily activities. What can AI do for business to aid task and meeting scheduling?

As of 2025, AI tools like ClickUp and Motion stand out in simplifying task and meeting scheduling. What gives them an edge is their ability to automate task management for your team.

For example, Motion auto-schedules tasks whenever they’re added, allocating each task a suitable time based on your current commitments. If your calendar indicates a tight meeting schedule, the AI tool reschedules based on priorities or deadlines. On the other hand, whenever you assign a task to a team member or client, it automatically updates their calendar and notifies them.

Product Development

AI is invaluable to small businesses during product development. Here’s how to use artificial intelligence in businesses for product development.

Companies can leverage it to conduct market research, analyze feedback from multiple datasets, and predict trends. With an in-depth report, businesses can identify gaps and unmet needs, guiding them in creating or improving products.

Another way AI tools can help in product development is by analyzing your products and defining suitable customer personas. Tools like Grok, Gemini, or ChatGPT can help research and uncover needs your product can fulfill.

AI tools can also help in innovation. For example, you can simulate scenarios, generate new ideas based on existing data, or optimize product designs. AI can be valuable in product development, ensuring it meets market demands.

Customer Service

How can AI help small businesses improve customer service in their processes? Modern SMBs must understand that overloaded support teams result in slow and poor response times.

However, leveraging AI tools opens up incredible possibilities to drive top-level customer service and support. Here is how to use AI for small business customer service. Chatbots offer the ideal customer service support. They provide instant responses, process orders, and answer routine FAQs without human intervention.

In addition, chatbots are affordable, unlike conventional methods that require large budgets. All that’s needed is to integrate them into your website and train them using your business knowledge base. After that, the AI tool can offer customer service 24/7 and proactively identify and resolve issues, among other perks.

Competitive Analysis

Competitor analysis is a critical hack, especially for small businesses, if they want to stand out in their niche. Gone are the days when businesses tracked their competitors’ moves manually.

Small businesses can use AI tools to scrape and collect competitors’ data and analyze it in real time. The data allows SMBs to tweak their marketing strategies, product offerings, and pricing accordingly. Tools like Ahrefs and SemRush provide AI-powered insights into a business’s online performance, allowing you to stay ahead or adapt quickly.

Personalized Marketing

Most inboxes are full of generic or spammy emails that often miss the marketing mark. This is a common trend for small businesses that lack a tailored marketing strategy. SMBs should personalize their marketing since customers respond well to tailored experiences.

Here is how to use AI for small business marketing. Leverage AI to personalize your marketing campaigns by segmenting your audiences. Fortunately, AI excels at delivering precisely that at scale. It goes beyond traditional demographics, including contextual signals, psychographics, and behavioral data.

How can AI help small businesses improve their marketing strategies beyond demographics?

AI tools allow you to create dynamic content, including personalized email subject lines, Ad creatives, and product descriptions. Businesses can also leverage real-time ad targeting and optimization. It achieves that by automating ad bidding, creative adjustments, and placement to achieve maximum ROI. For example, the AI tool segments and targets lookalike audiences, creates dynamic Ads, and automates budget allocation based on performance.

Research

AI is invaluable for research, especially for small businesses without dedicated research teams. SMBs can leverage it for data collection, uncovering hidden patterns, and providing real-time actionable insights.

What is AI used for in business research? AI automates collecting data by scanning large data sets and extracting valuable key data points. Then, it organizes the findings into simple, digestible visual reports.

AI also helps identify emerging threats or opportunities in workflows. SMBs can identify rising trends in the industry and predict long-term trends. AI tools are also handy in summarizing lengthy reports and connecting contrasting data points that reveal the bigger picture. For example, Perplexity is an AI tool that helps users search the Internet, scraping relevant data on a chosen topic. The tool also allows users to create custom personas, such as sales reps, and conduct research on specific topics.

With AI algorithms constantly improving, their research recommendations will get better at providing accurate feedback.

Content Creation

Content creation is the lifeblood of customer engagement, and if your SMB isn’t leveraging it, you're missing out big time. Brainstorming and idea generation are time-consuming tasks, but with AI, you can accelerate the process.

SMBs can use AI tools like ChatGPT to create content for their brands. For example, they can generate social media content, hooks, or video script ideas (TikTok) based on audience interests or trending topics within their niche.

In addition, businesses with blogs can use AI to brainstorm article ideas and topics based on specific keywords. SMBs can also create personalized email drafts for their marketing campaigns, blog outlines, and more.

AI can also help businesses repurpose their content by turning it into infographics, podcasts, or carousels (Instagram or LinkedIn). SMBs can also leverage AI tools to update outdated content with relevant keywords and fresh data.

Social Media Management

Small businesses on a budget will find AI valuable in managing their social media channels. With most companies having 3+ channels for outreach, managing the feedback and posting regularly can be overwhelming. However, leveraging AI can help simplify social media management processes by automating posting, optimization, curation, and more.

With posting, AI can help align your posting times with when your audience is active on the channels. It analyzes historical engagement data to determine the ideal posting time. AI also helps adjust postings based on platform algorithm changes, such as Reels prioritization on Instagram.

Creators who suffer from writer’s block will find AI tools valuable in content generation and curation. Through them, they can create relevant captions and hashtags. In addition, they can curate UGC content by scanning reviews or mentions.

The best part is that small businesses can use AI to create platform-specific content, such as infographics for LinkedIn or short videos for TikTok or Instagram Reels.

Lastly, AI helps simplify audience engagement and sentiment analysis. It automates responses to common queries through chatbots. AI tools also help flag spam or negative comments and escalate emergency cases for human intervention. In addition, AI helps analyze customer sentiment in DMs and comments to gauge brand perception.

Key Benefits of AI for Small Businesses

Small businesses can benefit from integrating AI into their business operations. Here are some of the advantages they can expect:

1. Increased Efficiency and Automation

What is AI for business? AI’s primary role is to enhance efficiency by automating repetitive tasks that drain productivity. Tasks like scheduling, content creation, and research are time-consuming, but SMBs can simplify these processes by leveraging AI tools.

For example, chatbots can operate around the clock, even on weekends, answering common FAQs. It ensures consistent customer service support without human intervention.

2. Cost Savings and Resource Optimization

AI tools help small businesses with a smaller budget lower operational costs and inefficient resource allocation. SMBs can deploy chatbots to assist in customer support, eliminating the need for dedicated support teams. Besides cutting labor costs, AI tools help optimize resource allocation through forecasting.

With inventory management, AI tools can help analyze seasonal patterns, market trends, and historical sales data to predict demand accurately. This allows businesses to avoid overstocking or missing sales because of shortages.

3. Improved Customer Experience

Tailored customer interactions foster better experiences, enhancing brand loyalty and advocacy. With the AI capability of hyper-personalization, your business can avoid one-size-fits-all interactions that miss their mark.

AI tools allow you to analyze customer data, aiding personalized messaging and recommendations. Not only that, but the instant support through chatbots reduces response wait times and improves support hours.

The best part is that AI tools provide small businesses with omnichannel consistency, solving disjointed experiences across social media, in-store, or via email.

4. Better Decison Making

Most small businesses rely on intuition and incomplete data when making strategic decisions, which is risky. However, using AI tools, SMBs can turn raw data into actionable insights, helping them predict outcomes.

With data-driven insights, AI aggregates all the data into unified reports. From there, it identifies hidden patterns. AI tools also help with predictive analytics, where they use ML to forecast inventory needs, cash flow, and sales. It also simulates scenarios for better insights.

AI tools also help in competitive benchmarking, allowing you to identify gaps in the market that competitors aren’t filling. Lastly, AI tools are handy in providing real-time decision support. For example, these tools offer live updates on metrics like inventory, web traffic, and Ad performance.

Not only that, but AI tools can also help solve misaligned marketing campaigns by analyzing customer feedback. AI can also help in segmenting audiences for hyper-personalized campaigns.

How to Choose the Right AI Tool for Your Business

Identifying the ideal AI for your SMB will improve business efficiency and save you money. Here are some factors to consider when picking an AI tool for your small business:

Cost

Small businesses often operate on tight budgets, making cost a high priority. However, it’s essential to remember that cost goes beyond the price tag and includes long-term ROI and value.

So, consider the AI tool pricing models and check if they offer a one-time purchase, subscription, or pay-per-use. The good thing is that most offer free trials for a limited time, which is excellent for SMBs to test.

Ensure you check the ongoing expenses, such as the total cost of ownership, including maintenance, training, scaling, and integrations. These fees can add up quickly, so it's essential to factor them into your budget.

Ease of Use

AI tools should simplify your business operations, not complicate them. Complexity can frustrate your team and stall adoption.

So, pick no-code tools with simple setup processes. Check for a tool with centralized customer communication software for a more effortless organization. The less time you spend configuring them, the quicker you adopt them and see results. Choose an AI tool with minimal training requirements.

Fortunately, most modern AI tools provide users with pre-made or custom templates that only require dragging and dropping. For example, Canva includes AI functionality to help users create professional designs without graphic design expertise. The tool recommends templates, allowing anyone to create a design effortlessly.

Integration

Identify AI tools that are compatible with your existing system to minimize disruption. Pick a tool that seamlessly syncs with your small business CRM, Shopify store, or email provider.

It’s essential to remember that incompatible tools create data silos and other inefficiencies. For example, a lack of compatibility can hinder the management of client relationships in Orderry customer management software.

Organized contact list with tags, balances, and campaigns

For businesses that use custom program, it is critical to check if the AI tool provides prebuilt connectors like Zapier or supports APIs. For example, Zapier’s AI suggests suitable automations depending on usage patterns, eliminating manual setups.

Scalability

Choose an AI tool that grows with your enterprise and adapts to changing demands. Look for a tool that can handle increased data volume, complex tasks, and additional users. Cloud-based tools excel here, given that they are agile and adapt to changing demand without requiring infrastructure upgrades.

Pick a provider that updates their AI tools often to keep up with changing dynamics and advancements for enhanced security and long-term relevance. For example, Shopify stores can use Smile.io loyalty programs for their customers.

Introducing Orderry: AI-Powered Business Automation

Orderry uses AI tools to help businesses automate their processes across web and mobile app platforms. With the mobile app, Orderry introduces several AI-driven features for use on the go. Here is how to use AI in an app on Orderry:

AI-Suggested Replies in Chat

It is an AI feature integrated into the business chat that helps SMBs analyze customer inquiries and generate context-aware replies in real time. The feature accelerates communication and maintains consistency.

AI-suggested replies to speed up your customer chats

AI-Powered Transcription for Voice Messages in Chats

A new Orderry AI feature integrated into the business chat that converts voice messages into text inside the chat window. The AI tool automatically generates text in the language used in the chat. The best part is that the transcription works even for longer voice notes of up to 5 minutes.

AI-powered voice message transcription for quick replies

AI-Powered Product Posting

Accelerate product uploads and streamline your inventory management. Let AI detect items, auto-complete product info, and create descriptions in seconds. Just upload your supplier file, match its fields to Orderry’s — and skip the manual work entirely.

AI-powered product posting in Orderry

AI-Powered Background Removal for Product Images

It is another Orderry AI feature that automatically removes product image backgrounds. This feature helps ensure professional visuals without manual editing, enhances product presentation, and speeds up business catalog updates.

Catalog Management

The mobile app introduces a catalog section that allows quick product additions via photos. The feature also has quick AI autofilling of the product details, such as descriptions and titles.

This is handy in eliminating manual entries and enhancing real-time syncing with the catalog database. In addition, the feature includes barcode scanning for simplified inventory tracking.

Adding new products with AI in Orderry mobile app

Final Thoughts

Picking an AI tool for your small business is not only about tech but also about aligning AI solutions to meet your operational needs. So, start by following a structured approach, define your goals, and start small to unlock the transformative features of AI tools.

If you’re eager to implement AI tools into your existing system, Orderry can help. Our scalable AI tools can help transform your processes to achieve your objectives.