.jpg?width=1920&name=Small%20business%20AI%20(2).jpg "Small business AI (2)")
AI isn’t just the domain of large multinational organisations. While big companies may have bigger budgets to experiment with AI, there are still plenty of low-cost, no-code AI tools for small businesses to try.
We’ve previously explored the best AI tools for learning and development, and more specialist AI voiceover for video tools, but this time we’re broadening our horizons and sharing some of the best AI tools for small businesses across areas such as marketing, accounting and project management. We believe that every business can benefit from the efficiencies of AI, and we want to show just how accessible it can be with the right tools at your disposal!
Brevo is an AI-enhanced marketing platform offering a host of conversion-focused features (email marketing, SMS marketing, push notifications and more), alongside some great AI functionality.
AI can help you write marketing emails, including those all-important subject lines, as well as enhancing the tone of voice and automatically optimising the send time of your messages for the best open and click rate.
Any marketer involved in SEO knows what a long, painful process it can be, from keyword research to optimising copy to crafting high-performing metadata… it’s a huge time-sink for small businesses, especially if you don’t have a dedicated SEO expert on hand.
Surfer SEO offers up AI-powered SEO that handles the keyword research, automates content optimisation, adds internal links and aligns your website with SEO best practices, without you having to lift a finger. If SEO is a priority for your small business, this AI tool could be your saviour.
All every marketer wants is the ability to know exactly what their customers are thinking at every hour of every day. Is that really so much to ask? Well, with Fullstory, maybe it’s not quite so far off.
Fullstory’s AI tracks site visitors’ entire ‘digital experience’ as they interact with your website – that means cursor moves, clicks and page visits – giving you a much clearer picture of what piques buyers’ interest, triggers them to act and, equally, turns them off. This helps you make predictions about buyer behaviour and optimise your website for better results.
Building a compelling landing page to convince a potential buyer to hand over their information is hard. It’s an art and a science – what works one day won’t necessarily work the next, so there’s a lot of trial and error involved.
Headlime’s AI landing page builder helps small businesses create custom landing pages in minutes with no writing, designing or coding needed. Simply choose a template, drag-and-drop the elements and download the landing page as an HTML file, ready to be uploaded to your website (or wherever else you want it). Easy peasy, lime squeezy.
Smartly is an AI-powered advertising management platform complete with a creative suite, media suite and intelligence suite to help businesses transform their digital advertising.
For small businesses, especially those without specialist paid media marketers, it can take a long time to set up PPC campaigns and other paid digital advertising, so tools like Smartly can significantly lighten the load with customised ad creation, cross-channel management and real-time optimisation, all across multiple campaigns.
Creating lots of video marketing content? Find our recommendations for the best AI voiceover for video tools!
Vic.ai takes the pain out of accounts payable by streamlining the invoice processing process. It automates the recording of invoices to reduce human errors and ensure everyone gets paid when they’re meant to get paid – ideal for small businesses who work with a lot of freelancers or external vendors.
Vic.ai boosts invoice processing productivity by a whopping 355%, alongside automated PO matching, AI approval flows and AI-driven analytics, helping small business accounting teams keep those tedious accounts payable processes running smoothly with far fewer errors.
It’s no secret that there are a lot of repetitive tasks in accounting, and Docyt aims to automate as many of them as possible for you. It promises financial accuracy, automated bookkeeping, enhanced collaboration and real-time insights, making it a great AI tool for small business accounting teams.
They also claim to have created the world’s first AI bookkeeper, called Gary – there’s not much public information about him just yet, but you can sign up for early access to ‘meet’ him!
Moss’ AI accounting add-on provides accounting teams with complete and accurate data for every transaction, which syncs with your normal accounting software to avoid duplicating effort.
Moss also takes care of your accounting grunt work by filling in accounting fields, chasing your employees for expense receipts and assigning costs, meaning you can spend time doing the real number-crunching, not wasting time on admin.
AutoEntry (from bookkeeping software giant Sage) offers up AI-powered data entry for accountants and bookkeepers. It automatically grabs data from receipts, invoices, statements and other financial documents, keeping your accounts moving swiftly and accurately.
It also helps analyse and categorise your transactions so you know exactly how much you’re spending in each area, helping you stay on budget. AutoEntry gives accountants the gift of time, as you can avoid spending precious hours manually copy-and-pasting information from invoices into your accounting software, all thanks to truly trustworthy AI.
Bookeeping.ai is, unsurprisingly, an AI accounting tool that claims to automate 95% of accounting tasks, which they say amounts to 57 hours a month. It takes care of everything from automated preparation of balance sheets, autoscanning receipts and invoices, AI-powered tax form completion, AI-generated financial spreadsheets and even an AI ‘TaxChat’ to find HMRC information in seconds.
It’s great for small businesses as it claims to replace up to seven tools and three experts, making it a more cost-effective way to manage your accounting. The Paula AI accountant also helps you automate manual accounting tasks, including updating balance sheets and creating budget spreadsheets.
Included is an AI people analytics solution that empowers HR teams and business leaders with actionable insights about your workforce. It analyses your real data to tell you how you compare to your industry, spot potential challenges and identify areas for improvement.
Opting for an AI tool like Included will help you retain your top talent, boost employee engagement, optimise your talent pipeline, improve performance and close equity gaps, ensuring your workplace is the best it can be, without requiring you to trawl through the data yourself.
Many managers really fear giving feedback, to the extent that they may just avoid it altogether. If a lack of manager feedback is an issue in your small business, an AI tool like Textio could be just what your managers need to provide better, fairer and more frequent feedback to employees.
It provides prompts to help managers get started with their feedback, or can help refine phrasing to make sure it’s relevant, clear, direct, actionable and appropriate, as well as checking for bias. It not only saves managers time, but also helps ensure that feedback actually does its job and triggers real change.
Empuls is an AI-driven employee engagement platform to help celebrate people’s work and create a thriving company culture. Thanks to AI, you can stay on top of those moments that matter to your employees, such as work anniversaries and birthdays, helping them feel recognised and appreciated to improve employee retention and happiness.
It’s also quick and easy to generate surveys to capture how employees are feeling at any given moment, so you can spot potential issues and act on them. The Em engagement bot also helps you close your employee engagement gaps by interacting with employees and managers, using smart nudges and prompts to drive participation and inclusion.
Zavvy is an AI-powered people enablement platform that allows small business HR teams to run people development and performance management from one place. Its AI automations save busy HR professionals hours on tedious, repetitive tasks, so you can spend time on the actual people management side of the job.
With Zavvy, you can use AI to generate career paths, growth plans and more, helping you build AI-enhanced loops to connect the dots between employees, their career goals and what they need to do to achieve them.
If you’re looking to turbocharge your talent strategy, but you only have a small HR team, it could be time to look to AI for some help with everything from goal setting to performance management and creating growth paths.
Peoplebox integrates neatly with your other tech, such as allowing you to run performance reviews via Slack or collecting 360 feedback with Microsoft Teams. You’ll also get handy AI CV screening to make hiring easier, as well as automated engagement surveys and people analytics.
Taplio integrates with LinkedIn to help salespeople build reach, engagement and followers in just 10 minutes a day. It generates AI content that will resonate with your audience, helping you build your profile and personal brand and get more eyes on your content.
Taplio helps you stop shouting into the void, and instead make real business connections with potential buyers. You can even create AI-generated LinkedIn carousels in seconds, potentially saving you hours creating your own in Canva.
Lavender is an AI email coach designed specifically to help salespeople generate more pipeline from their email outreach. It integrates with most sales platforms to make sending better sales emails a breeze, with the easy-to-use email assistant suggesting where you can improve your communications for better results.
It also helps with email personalisation, which is proven to significantly improve email open, click and response rates, helping your sales team book more meetings and meet their sales quotas.
AI tools for small business sales teams are usually focused on boosting efficiency and taking over time-consuming, repetitive tasks – but sometimes, they can become a whole extra team member.
SalesAPE is an AI sales tool that allows you to train your own AI sales rep, based on the best-performing members of your human sales team. This AI agent can double your sales calls from inbound leads by engaging leads with personalised conversations, before they get handed over to a real person.
More than ever before, sales reps are reliant on email for their cold sales outreach, which is why it’s so crucial to get your email sequence right. Reply is an AI sales email assistant which goes beyond standard generative AI to produce emails tailored to your buyer audience in seconds.
You’ll get access to an email quality check with every single email draft, helping you identify what’s most likely to resonate with your audience so your email performance just keeps getting better over time.
Many sales teams have started experimenting with customised sales videos to boost engagement with prospects, as it allows them to see the real human behind the cold messages. However, these can take time to record, edit and send.
Tavus is an AI-generated video tool which allows salespeople to create their ‘digital twin’, which can then be used to create personalised videos for buyers. You can simply give your digital twin a script and generate a realistic video, including lipsyncing and natural movement, in moments, greatly streamlining the sales video creation process for more efficient, tailored communications.
For small businesses, hiring great talent can take a lot longer than it should. Often there will only be one recruiter (or overstretched HR person) reviewing potentially hundreds of CVs, so the recruitment process can easily drag on.
Manatal’s AI recruitment software helps small businesses source and hire candidates faster, without having to work with expensive external recruitment agencies. Manatal’s AI-powered recommendation engine helps surface the best matches for your job openings within seconds, helping you whittle down your candidates into a manageable shortlist in seconds.
If you’re a small software business, you’ll often be on the lookout for great new developers. Pesto’s AI recruitment tool is specifically designed to match businesses with top development talent from around the world, using an intuitive ‘candidate search engine’ to find suitable developers without even having to post a job ad.
All your internal recruiter needs to do is ask five simple questions, and hey pesto! They’ll be matched with the 10 most suitable candidates – and what’s even better is that they’ve all been pre-vetted, saving you yet another task. You’ll also get access to brilliant talent from around the world without needing access to multiple job sites, helping you find the best person for the job, not just the closest.
Workable is often recommended as a top AI tool for small businesses, and with very good reason! Its AI-enhanced hiring platform empowers you to post across 200+ job boards simultaneously, then benefit from AI-vetted recommendations from over 400 million candidate profiles.
It also allows you to use AI to display your job ad in the social media feeds of thousands of relevant candidates, saving you from manual targeting and posting, and you can even use Workable to manage your employee referral programme, generate AI job descriptions and interview questions, making it a recruitment powerhouse for small businesses.
For startups looking to grow quickly, Wellfound is a must-know AI tool. wellfound:ai is Wellfound’s AI recruiter, and it was created to automate your entire hiring process, from sourcing great candidates to scheduling interviews with your favourites.
All you need to do is outline your ideal hire, and wellfound:ai will have qualified, interested candidates from a pool of 500 million+ booked in your calendar within days. It aggregates billions of data points to find you the best-possible matches for your open roles, and it learns quickly from your direction to improve its recommendations over time.
Recruit CRM is a reasonably priced AI-powered recruitment automation platform, making it a solid AI tool for small businesses looking to build their teams. With Recruit CRM, you get both an applicant tracking system (ATS) and candidate relationship management (CRM) software, alongside all the integrations you need to make small business hiring easy. Plus, it integrates with systems such as Outlook, Gmail and LinkedIn to minimise manual processes.
On top of this, you’ll get an email sequencing feature which uses AI, automated triggers and templates to ensure speedy email responses to all candidate communications, AI CV parser and a GPT integration to help you write job descriptions at speed – perfect for small, overstretched recruitment teams!
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