How SMBs Can Use AI Automation to Grow Faster, Work Smarter, and Stay Competitive
SMBs – small to medium-sized businesses – have the most to gain from adopting AI automation into their business workflows. Implementing AI into your business will increase your efficiency and profitability without sacrificing quality.
The best part? Most of your competitors are not using AI business automation to its full capacity (or even at all), so you have a once-in-a-lifetime chance to stay ahead of the game.
Feeling overwhelmed by the AI challenge? In this article, you’ll learn:
• Why SMB leaders like yourself must embrace AI for business automation now
• Different ways to use AI automation in your business to drive sustainable growth
• AI automation examples you can emulate
The Benefits of AI Business Automation for SMBs
SMBs are the perfect candidate for optimizing their operations with AI workflow automation tools.
Why? Because small to medium businesses are stretched for time and resources. You’re trying to deliver the absolute best for your customers with a small team and limited budget. In addition, you’re wasting hours on repetitive tasks when you should be focusing on more strategic priorities to drive your business forward.
So, a tool that saves you time without sacrificing quality is an absolute game changer! With proper use of AI automation tools, you can:
• Increase productivity and cost savings across all teams
• Automate workflows that take up hours every week
• Standardize business processes with AI
• Boost the quality of your work
• Innovate and offer better solutions for your customers
• Promote employee happiness and retention by allowing team members to focus on rewarding work
How Can SMBs Use AI?
So, now you’re convinced you need to adopt AI automation software into your business. Now you are probably wondering: what can we actually do with these AI tools?
In this next section, I’ll outline some of the top AI use cases for small to medium businesses.
1. Intelligent AI Chatbot
AI chatbots for business have been used in customer service and sales for years. But the new generation of conversational AI chatbots are much more advanced than before.
Past chatbots operated on a logic tree: “If this happens, do this.” There was a limited set of options you had to map out in advance. If a customer asked an unconventional question, the chatbot wouldn’t know how to respond.
Modern AI chatbots are now powered by large language models (LLM), meaning you can give them roles and goals. They’re not limited to a standard set of questions and responses and use natural language processing (NLP) to understand and answer almost any question.
Putting one of these AI chatbots on your website can help improve your customer service, solve customer problems, promote sales, and save manpower. And the best part is they can operate 24/7 without having to take vacation days off!
If you’re using a CRM or marketing automation, you might already have access to a conversational AI chatbot, so check this before investing in any new tools. Setting up a AI chatbot is simple: you can give it access to your website and documentation, and it will be able to train itself.
2. AI Content Generation for Marketing
Content is still a key marketing channel for most businesses, and most companies have found it effective for boosting leads. But, nearly half of all content marketing work is outsourced.
Instead of investing an enormous budget in copywriters, designers, and videographers, AI content generation allows SMBs to spend less on contractors and get some work done in-house.
So you can use it for:
• Content ideas — AI assistant tools like ChatGPT can help you research topics and ideas, get keyword suggestions, and develop a content plan
• Blog articles and social media posts — Create briefs and outlines for content writers in minutes. You can even get a decent first draft
• Website copy — Refresh your website copy to pitch your services to visitors
• Original images — Tools like MidJourney and Dall-E are perfect for whipping up images to accompany posts or blogs
• Video creation — Use AI automation to automatically edit and add captions
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to AI content generation. You can dive deeper by creating GPTs trained on your brand voice or using advanced AI automation software for video creation.
3. AI Automation for Sales
Another awesome way to use AI is to speed up your sales cycle. Sales drive profit, and with the help of AI automation, you’ll be able to maximize sales with less effort.
You can use AI to:
• Automatically record meetings and generate notes and summaries
• Draft cold emails, follow-ups, and proposals
• Standardize sales data and notes
• Automate tedious processes like CRM data entry
These AI-powered virtual assistant tools give every salesperson a helper to reduce manual work and assist with daily tasks. This frees up time for meeting with potential clients and managing customer relationships.
4. AI in HR Management
There’s a common fear that AI will take our jobs, but what if AI assistant could actually help companies hire the best people?
Examples of how AI-powered resume screening and tools can be used:
• Write good job descriptions to attract ideal candidates
• Analyze resumes to select the best candidates for a role
• Create customized questions for interviews
• Build personalized training based on new hires’ skills and experience
• Analyze employee feedback from surveys to gauge sentiment
• Standardize performance reviews using AI
5. AI-Powered Business Process Automation
AI in business process automation can be used in every department to reduce time spent on tedious tasks and improve documentation.
For example, AI workflow tools can help you create a library of SOPs, guides, and company knowledge. With AI, you can write onboarding processes or company policies much faster.
Use AI workflow management tools to:
• Build a library of knowledge and organize documents
• Extract relevant information from company content
• Automate internal reporting
• Create an automatic workflow with AI tools
• Record meetings and transcribe notes
Notion is an excellent tool for this kind of work because it combines a customizable, all-in-one workspace with the power of AI workflow automation. It’s efficient to have AI powered automation built into the workspace where you organize all your information. Our team at Abeta Automation uses this tool on a daily basis to organize our tasks and collaborate on different projects – and the best part is that the tool is free!
AI Adoption in Business – Where to Start?
Don’t know where to start? Here are my tips for integrating AI automation for business:
• Identify tedious workflows – Automate repetitive tasks to free up time
• Use accessible AI tools – Start with tools already in your stack or ChatGPT
• Educate employees about AI tools – Show how AI can benefit their roles
• Improve the customer experience with AI – Only use AI when it enhances service
• Consult an AI automation expert – Get training, custom setups, and faster ROI
If you have any questions or want to learn how AI can help your business, schedule a free consultation with us in the link below: