Running a small business can be overwhelming. With so many tasks to manage, things can slip through the cracks, especially when competing with larger companies. Fortunately, AI tools can lighten the load by automating repetitive tasks, freeing up time for more valuable work. This blog will help you get started with AI for your small business by introducing you to the top AI tools that can help your company grow faster, run more efficiently, and stay competitive—all without needing a big budget or technical skills.
One solution to help you discover the best AI tools for your business is AI Acquisition’s AI operating system. This valuable tool helps companies identify, implement, and operate AI tools to improve their business operations.
With AI tools, small businesses can offer 24/7 customer support, a service that can help them stand out from competitors. Our latest State of AI Report states that customer service professionals consider round-the-clock support AI’s most significant benefit. This feature is driven primarily by AI chatbots and self-service tools.
Not only can these tools help customers find solutions to their problems quickly, but they can also assist with resolving issues that may require human intervention. For instance, when a customer reaches out to your business on a messaging platform, a chatbot can greet the customer and provide immediate answers to their questions.
If the customer’s issue is complex, the bot can help troubleshoot the problem and guide the customer through the process of resolving it. If there’s a need for human intervention, AI can pinpoint the customer’s issue and prioritize their support ticket.
When the customer’s issue is transferred to a human agent, AI can assist the agent by providing solutions based on the customer’s previous interactions and responses. This can help improve the customer experience by reducing the time spent resolving their issue and eliminating the need for the customer to repeat their problem to a stranger.
AI can assist with automating tedious processes, improving audience targeting, personalizing content, and optimizing campaigns for better performance. AI tools can help your small business create effective marketing strategies to:
AI can analyze your business’s customer data to uncover insights about ideal customers and how to reach them. It can then automate outreach to this target audience (even if they’re not yet on your contact list) and personalize content to increase engagement. Finally, AI can optimize campaigns as they’re running to improve performance and ROI.
AI reduces the time employees spend on repetitive tasks, allowing focus on higher-level activities. With AI solutions, employees make better decisions and create higher-quality work. For example, in marketing, AI analyzes data and provides recommendations to create content that resonates with target audiences. AI helps produce better results that improve business performance.
If you're serious about turning AI into a real business, AI Acquisition is hands-down the most powerful tool. It’s more than just software; it’s a full system that helps professionals and business owners start and scale AI-driven businesses without needing:
You’ll leverage proven tools plus AI Acquisition’s proprietary ai-clients.com operating system, which automates lead generation, client outreach, and service delivery using AI. Whether you're just starting out or looking to grow, you'll receive expert guidance, a step-by-step roadmap, and access to the same system that helped its founder transition from corporate burnout to $ 500,000 per month in under two years.
Whether you're a freelancer, coach, agency owner, or career-changer, AI Acquisition gives you everything you need to launch and grow with AI fast. Free training and strategy call available.
HubSpot is a CRM platform that helps simplify processes across sales, marketing, and customer support. The platform integrates AI recommendations across these areas to help you improve anywhere from inbound marketing campaigns to your business operations. HubSpot’s CRM is free.
Paid plans start at $50 monthly and vary based on team size and subscription tier. You can find core AI features like:
Customer data holds all sorts of clues to business success—imagine if you could just talk to it and ask it questions. Well, that’s the idea behind Salesforce’s genAI CRM assistant, formerly known as Einstein Copilot but now part of the Agentforce agentic AI suite. It can dive into your customer data to answer in-depth questions and identify new business opportunities.
With a ton of domain-specific knowledge acquired by Salesforce over many years of operation, Agentforce Assistant can also craft sales emails, intelligently update and track customer records, and generate follow-up tasks.
Business intelligence and data visualization enable real-time data analysis and informed decision-making through actionable observations. Microsoft's business intelligence platform has evolved from its 2011 origins as “Project Crescent” to incorporate Gen AI capabilities through Copilot integration.
Microsoft processes data from multiple sources to create interactive dashboards for real-time analysis and reporting. A large-scale example of its capabilities is demonstrated by Heathrow Airport's deployment of real-time passenger flow monitoring.
The platform enables non-technical users to generate reports using natural language prompts, thereby reducing the time required to extract business intelligence. Microsoft continues to develop AI features that complement, rather than replace, traditional BI functions, making data analysis accessible to broader organizational roles.
Full-cycle ML workflows, enabling developers and data scientists to create, train, and deploy ML models on the cloud. In November 2017, AWS launched SageMaker to address the ML workflow from data preparation through model deployment. The cloud-based platform is unique in its ability to provide tools for developers and data scientists to build, train, and deploy ML models at scale.
Integrating AI into cloud services and end-to-end AI deployment, offering a comprehensive suite for building, training, and deploying ML models. Google’s comprehensive AI suite launched with App Engine in 2008 and evolved to include Vertex AI for managed ML.
The platform integrates with Google Cloud services, including BigQuery, and offers AutoML capabilities alongside Vertex Pipelines, spanning:
From the tool, healthcare provider Sami Saúde achieved 13% productivity gains, and AES reduced energy safety audit costs by 99%.
Real-time, AI-powered business analytics, enabling intuitive, data-driven decision-making for all users. Founded in 2012 by Ajeet Singh and the team, ThoughtSpot addresses the bottleneck created by traditional BI tools requiring SQL expertise. The platform enables natural language queries against data sources, generating instant visualizations through its “Spotter” AI Analyst.
Users can ask questions in plain English rather than writing complex database queries, and the system connects to cloud platforms while eliminating data silos through seamless analytics integration. Business users across sales and marketing functions gain self-service access to real-time insights, eliminating the need for data teams to use the tool.
Enterprise knowledge search and AI-powered answers, eliminating knowledge silos and reducing time spent searching for internal information. CEO: Arvind Jain, Founder & CEO. Launched in 2021 after a two-year period in stealth mode, Glean addresses knowledge fragmentation across enterprise SaaS applications.
Jain identified the problem during his tenure at Rubrik, where employees spent excessive time searching for information across cloud applications. The platform’s abilities include searching over 100 workplace tools, including:
It maintains permission structures and creates a universal search layer that transforms information retrieval from human expert dependency to self-service knowledge access.
An example of the tool’s capabilities is demonstrated by Super.com, which saves 1,500 hours monthly and accelerates employee onboarding by 20%. Additionally, Deutsche Telekom has deployed an employee concierge serving 80,000 staff members for IT and HR requests.
Capabilities for business: Unifying data lakes and data warehouses for comprehensive data engineering, ML, and analytics. The lakehouse architecture emerged in the late 2010s as enterprises sought single platforms for structured and unstructured data, but the platform was founded in 2013 by Apache Spark creators from UC Berkeley.
The unified approach eliminates data movement between disparate systems, reducing costs and complexity while enabling both business intelligence and machine learning workloads on a consistent infrastructure. The platform combines the flexibility of a data lake with the reliability of a warehouse through Delta Lake's ACID transactions and Unity Catalog governance.
Adobe uses the platform to unify data and AI at scale, whilst Rolls-Royce Civil Aerospace monitors jet engines in real-time.
Conversational AI applications are beneficial for designing, developing, and deploying AI-powered chatbots and virtual assistants.
IBM unveiled Watson in 2011 as part of the DeepQA project led by David Ferrucci. The Assistant focuses on conversational AI applications with natural language understanding for complex multi-turn conversations, and integrates with messaging and CRM channels whilst providing analytics dashboards for performance monitoring.
The platform demonstrates specialization over general-purpose models, providing business-specific conversational AI that handles enterprise requirements for reliability, context awareness, and measurable performance in customer-facing applications.
Sicredi improved customer service operations, and Technology Dynamics reduced customer care delivery time from months to weeks with the tool. Furthermore, beyond chatbots, Watson applications include:
CRM-integrated AI insights, enhancing customer relationship management, sales, and service. Launched in September 2016, Einstein AI integrates predictive analytics and ML into Salesforce’s CRM ecosystem. Einstein enables hyper-personalization through tailored content recommendations and send-time optimization for marketing campaigns. It analyzes customer data, including purchase history and browsing behavior, to predict needs and preferences.
Einstein illustrates human-AI collaboration, where agents review and edit AI-generated responses, rather than relying on fully automated interactions, thereby maintaining quality while improving efficiency. The platform provides lead scoring, opportunity insights, and engagement optimization across sales, marketing, and service functions.
Iron Mountain achieved an 80% close rate on AI-generated support replies and reduced chat abandonment by 70%.
Capabilities for business: Conversational AI and content generation, enhancing customer service, automating content creation, and streamlining operations. OpenAI released ChatGPT as a research preview in November 2022, demonstrating its potential for enterprise applications beyond initial consumer adoption.
The Gen AI chatbot is widely recognized and utilized globally, automating customer service, content creation, and operational processes through conversational interfaces. The tool also streamlines marketing and social media content production, reducing the time spent on research and drafting.
ChatGPT has accelerated business operations worldwide, but it has also, like many other AI tools, triggered conversations about the need for validation processes and human oversight to prevent reputational damage in customer-facing applications.
Capabilities for business: Productivity AI platform, enhancing productivity and collaboration across Microsoft 365 applications. Introduced as Bing Chat in February 2023 and rebranded to Copilot in November 2023, Microsoft’s AI assistant integrates with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, including:
The platform automates document drafting, meeting summarization, and data analysis through natural language prompts. There are many companies worldwide that benefit from Microsoft Copilot – for example, Coca-Cola, which has documented operational efficiency improvements, reducing routine document production time by half.
Shopify experienced a 15% reduction in commit times by utilizing GitHub Copilot. The tool democratizes AI for non-technical users while creating dependency on Microsoft’s cloud. CEO Satya Nadella drives strategic integration across Microsoft offerings, leveraging existing enterprise software dominance to accelerate Copilot adoption through seamless workflow integration.
Jotform AI Agents shine when it comes to automating workflows and improving customer experience. Instead of just displaying static forms, these agents actively guide users, provide real-time assistance, take calls, and even trigger automated actions like:
The flexibility of Jotform’s AI Agents is impressive. You can create an agent from scratch, use a pre-built template (there are over 7000 of them), or even generate one that mimics your style and responses. These AI-powered assistants can be embedded into:
They’re adaptable to various business needs. Security is another strong point. Jotform AI Agents operate within Jotform’s secure infrastructure, ensuring data privacy and compliance with industry standards.
That said, while Jotform AI Agents are excellent for interactive forms and customer support, they may not be as robust for complex AI-driven conversations compared to specialized chatbot platforms. Users seeking in-depth, AI-powered conversational logic may require further customization.
If any company should be concerned about the rise of computer-generated images and videos, it’s Adobe. The company has maintained an effective monopoly in the creative software industry for several decades and is now adjusting its approach to stay ahead of generative AI.
Firefly is the result of that pivot, a beta web service that lets users create brand-new AI images or edit existing files based on text prompts. The tool’s big break came when Adobe bundled it into Photoshop as a beta capability. To test out the tool, we took a sample image of a runner with her dog and tried to add generative content to it.
I first extended the base canvas to accommodate a large selection box at the bottom. I then asked Photoshop to fill the area, within seconds, the tool generated the image above. It looks natural, with expected lighting and reflections, though on closer inspection, you can see the reflection of the dog isn’t quite right.
With some quick Photoshop tweaks using its cloning tools, you could easily tweak this. The tool is surprisingly easy to use and, provided the result is near-perfect each time, would significantly reduce both editing time and the skill required to generate unique images. The only downside is Adobe remains one of the most expensive creative software suites around.
Perplexity AI is an innovative search tool that combines natural language processing with traditional search functionality to provide users with more intuitive, conversational answers. Unlike conventional search engines that primarily deliver links to websites, Perplexity AI responds directly to user queries with succinct, relevant answers, often citing multiple sources for added credibility.
Perplexity is particularly valuable for businesses and professionals who require quick insights without the need to sift through multiple web pages. The AI behind Perplexity operates similarly to chat-based AI models, allowing users to ask complex questions in everyday language. For example, a user might ask:
Perplexity AI then parses these inquiries and generates clear, concise answers. The responses are typically followed by links to the sources, enabling users to delve deeper if they wish. This format saves time by offering direct answers first, with source material readily available for further reading.
Perplexity AI’s primary strength lies in its capacity to provide context and nuance, making it an excellent asset for research and knowledge acquisition in fast-paced fields. With its ability to interpret and respond to a broad array of topics, Perplexity AI is useful for professionals in:
Its simplicity makes it accessible to users of all experience levels, eliminating the need for advanced search skills.
Ever wondered what your voice would sound like if you were a warm, kind, mid-sixties woman from Scotland called Jennifer? Altered Studio uses AI to transform your speech into a completely different voice. Say, for example, you wanted a 20-something woman to voice your new YouTube ad, but didn’t want the expense and hassle of booking a voice actor.
You can record the audio yourself, upload it to Altered Studio, and pick from a vast bank of AI-generated voice characters. The voices are unbelievably convincing. You’d struggle to tell them apart from real voice actors. Visit the site to listen to various samples, or take up the free trial and experiment with a limited selection available to subscribers.
There’s a vast range of potential uses for Altered Studio. It may provide a second or third podcast host for a podcast or can introduce speakers at a conference. In our tests, it performed best when a voice recording was provided. It also offers text-to-speech, but this feature is distinguished by a robotic speech pattern that identifies it as AI.
With dozens of text-to-image services out there, it’s impossible to say which is best. Nonetheless, the one service I consistently turn to for AI-generated art is Midjourney, which consistently delivers high-quality results across a wide variety of styles and genres.
Midjourney has enhanced accessibility with a web-based interface, moving beyond Discord-only use. Users can input prompts directly through a user-friendly site, streamlining the image generation process. The platform maintains its community aspect, allowing users to explore and draw inspiration from shared prompts and images.
The service continues to offer extensive customization options, allowing users to adjust parameters such as aspect ratio (e.g., "--ar 16:9") and the level of "chaos" to influence image variability. Midjourney excels in stylistic emulation, adeptly generating images in the distinctive styles of artists like:
Copilot is an autocomplete for code. It’s a code-editor extension that sits quietly in the background, until you start entering or tweaking code on a page, after which you’ll likely see suggested edits appear in grey.
For coding novices, it’s beneficial when used in conjunction with AI-written code. For example, I asked Bing AI to assist me in writing a basic VAT calculator. You enter a price, click a button, and it displays the price excluding VAT. I asked it to deliver HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, and it did so perfectly.
I’ve got my lovely VAT calculator. I want to create an About page for my website, so people know where to hire this coding genius. I make an about.html file and start entering <!DOCTYPE html> at the top of the page, and Copilot takes over. It suggests a <head> with About in the title tags and automatically creates a link to the correct stylesheet.
It even starts suggesting copy for the page, as you can see in the screenshots, writing: “This is a simple VAT calculator. It calculates the price without VAT from the price with VAT.” It's not going to win any prizes for elegance, but the AI has written an explanation of what the site does without prompting. This is a basic example, but it’s capable of far more.
For example, you can write in the comments exactly what to do, and CoPilot will suggest the necessary code. Instantly. Right there in Visual Studio Code or other popular editors. Often, with multiple suggestions, it offers an alternative in case you don’t like the first solution. It’s no replacement for coding knowledge.
You’ll still need to understand how the plumbing works, and it'll occasionally go wrong. But GitHub Copilot is almost guaranteed to make your coding jobs monumentally easier.
Video is critical on social media, but not everyone can afford a team to shoot content. Fliki could save you a bundle on the camera crew. Write a video script, choose a virtual host to narrate it, select stock video and images for each scene (or upload your own), and add background music if desired.
The AI voice narration sounds too synthetic, although you can manually alter the pitch of words or correct mispronunciations of brands or other words. But this will surely improve over time. Fliki offers a free plan, allowing you to try out the tools before subscribing to remove watermarks and enhance video quality.
Notion has become one of those trendy apps; it’s a OneNote for people who like to be seen. It’s one of those all-encompassing note-takers that can be used for creating to-do lists, bashing out ideas, taking notes from meetings, and even as a public wiki for your company’s products. It has recently added a set of very well-implemented AI tools to the mix.
As you’re writing on any page, you can simply press the space bar at the start of a new line and activate the AI tools. Here, you can ask the AI to autocomplete a passage you’re writing, list ten ideas on different ways you could market a new product, or create a to-do list of items you’ll need to pack for a trip.
If you’ve used it to take meeting notes, it can pick out the action points; if you’ve written a description of a new product line, the AI can take a stab at writing the press release. The AI responses flow into the page within a couple of seconds, and it’s easy to edit out any daft suggestions.
Creating presentations can be time-consuming, but SlidesAI streamlines this process by transforming text into structured slides. As an add-on for Google Slides, it allows users to input text, which the AI then organizes into a coherent presentation. The free plan permits up to 36 presentations annually, each with a 2,500-character limit.
For more extensive needs, the Pro plan, at $8.33 per month (billed annually), offers 120 presentations per year with a 6,000-character limit per presentation. The Premium plan, at $16.67 per month (billed annually), provides unlimited presentations with a 12,000-character limit per presentation.
While Grok can be used as a standalone AI assistant, you're most likely to see it in action on X (formerly known as Twitter). I don't know if the Grok integration makes X a better place, since half the comments on any post I read now involve users tagging Grok to fact-check the original poster.
It’s probably a net good—it holds people more accountable to the truth—but I also think it's disrupted the natural flow of conversation on Elon's social media behemoth.
Grok is a brilliant model, and I appreciate that it's essentially uncensored. It comes with several reasoning modes, such as 'Think', which gives the model more time to process and refine its response, and 'Deep Search', which searches the internet using a setup that resembles a RAG-style approach.
The lack of censorship also extends to its impressive image generation capabilities, which make it my go-to option for generating pictures of celebrities, brands, or simply creating a good meme.
Claude has been the go-to AI assistant for coding for a while now. Some of the other tools on this list are starting to catch up, but I still think it’s fair to say most developers swear by Claude.
I’m not a professional developer, but I dabble, and when I do, Claude is my first choice. It’s good at writing clean, well-documented code, and even better at explaining what that code does in plain English. In my experience, Claude’s code tends to be more reliable as well. I’ve had fewer issues with hallucinated variables or broken logic compared to when I’ve used ChatGPT.
I also just like how Claude communicates. It feels collaborative, more like it’s solving the problem with me, not just spitting out answers I have to wrangle into shape.
Synthesia is an AI video generator that enables you to create realistic AI-generated human avatar videos. I’ve used it for creating training modules and presentations, and it’s clear why it’s a favorite for learning and development teams. By turning text into video, Synthesia streamlines the production of high-quality content, eliminating the need for:
Its most popular use case is undoubtedly training videos, but Synthesia is versatile enough to handle a wide range of needs. Businesses use it for internal communications, onboarding new employees, and creating customer support or knowledge base videos. On the marketing side, it excels in producing:
I’ve also personally found it handy for website videos that require a polished, professional touch with minimal effort. Synthesia is extremely easy to use; simply type in your script and then generate your video.
Zapier Agents is an experimental AI workspace where you can teach AI agents to work across thousands of apps. But the interface is a chatbot, which means that creating your own AI agent is as simple as using ChatGPT. Start by giving your agent access to your company's source of truth in apps like:
You can ask it about your data as well as all the data in your apps, and data sources will sync automatically. And you can train your agents to work even while you're not there: tell your agent what to do when it's triggered, how to process or summarize data, and which actions it should take, all without writing a line of code.
These agents are like mini-teammates who help you with specific tasks, like analyzing your spreadsheets, searching the web, or drafting responses to customers. It's AI chat, automation, and data analysis all in one place.
Runway is a video magic wand. The new Gen-3 Alpha model represents a significant advancement in AI video generation, positioning it as one of the best commercially available solutions. It features a set of interesting capabilities that enable you to generate videos with AI, train your models, and paint specific parts of frames using text prompts.
The learning curve is very rewarding, and the app is growing at an incredible pace. Be sure to check it out.
Descript transcribes your videos into a script. Then, instead of using a timeline to trim the audio and video tracks, you edit the text script. As you do so, the video is automatically trimmed. The rest of the editing process works similarly, cutting the time it takes to edit your talking head videos.
A project management heavyweight, Asana adds a wide range of useful AI-powered features. Smart goals utilize historical data to develop more effective goals for the quarter. It identifies project risks and workflow blockers, allowing you to address issues before they arise. And it provides answers to anything related to your projects, helping you gain more visibility into what is (or isn't) happening.
You might have seen Fathom pop up during work calls—it’s one of the most genuinely useful AI tools I use on a daily basis. It’s an AI notetaker that joins your Zoom or Microsoft Teams meetings, records the entire conversation, and tracks who said what. If I forget an action item, need to revisit an explanation, or just want to double-check what someone said, it's convenient.
Alongside a full transcript, Fathom generates a clear, structured summary. The notes are consistently accurate and well-organized.
n8n lets you automate tasks that are boring, repetitive, or time-consuming. It can feel intimidating at first, but I’ve found it easy to use once you get accustomed to it. To build an automation, connect apps and services into a visual workflow. Simply drag and link nodes together; it’s an intuitive setup. You don’t need to know how to code to build useful automations.
If you do code, n8n gives you the flexibility to add custom functions and go deeper. One workflow I set up does a daily backup of critical data to a Google Sheet. Here’s how it works:
AI Acquisition helps professionals and business owners start and scale AI-driven businesses with minimal friction. We help you leverage existing AI tools and our proprietary AI Clients operating system to get your business up and running quickly. You don’t need to worry about a technical background or investing a lot of money to get started. AI does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Check out my free training to see how I used this exact system to transition from a burned-out corporate Director to earning $500,000 per month in under two years. With AI Acquisition, you can achieve life-changing results like these as well.
AI is transforming every industry, creating a wealth of opportunities for smart, motivated people to start and scale AI-driven businesses. I’m not talking about the stuff that gets all the hype, like ChatGPT. I’m talking about how companies can use AI to improve operations and reduce costs, and how you can build an AI business that helps them implement these technologies.
There’s a massive demand for these services, and you can leverage existing AI tools to deliver results quickly.
Get the exact playbook we used to build our own AI-powered agency. Inside, you'll discover the strategies, tools, and workflows that helped us systemize growth.
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