For small businesses, AI can significantly enhance several key processes, helping to streamline operations, improve decision-making, and increase profitability. Here are some business processes that can benefit the most from AI and a few suggestions for apps you may want to try:

Marketing Automation – Personalizing email and ad campaigns, optimizing ad spend, and tracking customer behavior.

  • HubSpot: Uses AI to automate email marketing, optimize campaigns, and deliver personalized content.
  • ActiveCampaign: Offers AI-powered email marketing, customer experience automation.
  • Mailchimp: Features AI tools for predictive analytics, audience segmentation, and email marketing automation.

Customer Service – AI chatbots and virtual assistants provide 24/7 support, improving customer experience.

  • Freshdesk: operates as an all-in-one customer service software platform offering sales, marketing, and support tools. Freshdesk also offers curated reports and analytics.
  • Fin by Intercom: The “natural language AI bot” works within the Intercom platform, asking clarifying questions to understand complex queries. Fin can provide custom answers as well as triaging complex problems for seamless human handoff.
  • Tidio: A customer service platform that combines live chat, chatbots, and AI-driven automation.

Sales Forecasting – Analyzing patterns to predict future sales trends.

  • Helium 10: – AI sales is specifically for businesses that sell on ecommerce marketplaces like Amazon and Walmart. The Starter package comes with product research, keyword research, listing optimization, operations features, and more.
  • Zoho CRM with Zia AI: – an AI-powered sales assistant from Zoho CRM that can help with sales-related tasks like predicting sales outcomes, analyzing sales data, and monitoring customer behavior.
  • Gong.io: – an AI platform to analyze customer interactions across all channels. It can generate sales call summaries that identify pain points and outcomes and provide insights in any language.

Inventory Management – Automating stock tracking and demand forecasting.

  • Stockwise: analytics app that accurately predicts what, when and how much stock in your supply chain you should reduce or replenish.
  • Zoho Inventory: Uses AI to predict stock levels and improve inventory tracking.
  • TradeGecko: Provides AI-powered forecasting and automates order management.

Accounting and Financial Management – Automates bookkeeping, invoicing, and expense tracking.

  • Botkeeper: Automates the most manual and time-consuming bookkeeping work, simplifying your workload and giving business owners timely financial updates.
  • Xero with Hubdoc: Automates invoicing, expense tracking, and reconciliations using AI tools.
  • FreshBooks: Uses AI for automated accounting processes, including invoicing and expense management.

HR and Recruiting – Streamlines hiring by screening resumes and automating interview scheduling.

  • Breezy HR: Automates job posting, candidate screening, and scheduling interviews using AI.
  • Workable: Uses AI to optimize candidate sourcing, screening, and assessment.
  • Lever: AI-powered talent acquisition platform for resume parsing, matching, and candidate engagement.

AI optimizes processes, reduces costs, and enhances productivity, making it a game-changer for small businesses.

 

Contributor: Melinda Emerson

Email: [email protected]