The 8 Best AI Tools For Small Business
If AI seemed far-fetched until not long ago, AI tools are on everyone’s top priority list in 2024.
In all honesty, it’s not rocket science to implement AI. But what requires more thinking when managing limited resources is what tool to acquire.
So, next up, you’ll learn what AI tools suit small businesses based on specific use cases and what criteria to look for in choosing your new AI apps.
Here are the tools you’ll learn about :
- Timeular to track time and manage any leave type
- Jasper AI to create content
- Notion AI to manage projects and tasks
- GitHub Copilot to write code
- FeedHive to manage your social media presence
- Descript to create video at scale
- Canva to generate visual assets (imagery)
- Zeni.ai to make accounting simpler
Use cases and tools AI in a small business
Manage and track time and leaves
For small businesses, time isn’t just a metric but rather a currency of success.
It’s fairly easy for small business leaders to jump on many opportunities and initiatives that can generate growth, but what’s pivotal is making sure you’re making data-driven decisions for your growth to be sustainable.
By tracking time diligently, both you and your team will learn to manage it better, but most importantly, it will help you answer questions like:
Which tasks monopolize our resources, and how can we redirect energy and allocate resources for better outcomes?
Is overtime creeping up on our team’s schedule?
How do we optimize our team’s productivity without compromising work-life balance?
Are we investing enough time in the right activities that align with our long-term goals?
What are the initiatives we spent the least amount of time on but were the most effective?
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Timeular
Timeular is a pioneer in AI-powered time tracking, merging productivity enhancement with smart leave management.
It replaces disjointed tools serving one function only (e.g., only PTO management) and offers small businesses an automated and unified solution.
Awarded by Capterra for its intuitiveness as the “Best Ease of Use Tool in 2023” and recognized by its users, Timeular removes the guesswork from your data while it requires one commitment to track one minute a day.
“People complain a lot less about time tracking now because of the easy interface of Timeular.”
Kaitlin Snow Seamons, Executive Creative Director at Harmon Brothers
Timeular’s key features:
Captures and adds AI time entry suggestions in your calendar for an honest overview of your time spent on tasks so that your calendar becomes an accurate reflection of your workday, client billing, and reporting;
Tracks automatically your work in the background and adds apps, docs, and websites you’ve used in your timesheet once you’ve approved them;
It’s designed to notice personal productivity patterns with AI, such as apps that sidetrack your efficiency or times you’re at peak productivity, and add them to a dashboard visible only to the primary user. Let’s be honest: as a small business owner, you don’t have time to micro-manage your team but rather empower them to remove roadblocks themselves;
Time reporting system suitable either for client reporting or checking up on project profitability;
Helps you stay within budget on projects with budget notifications, ensuring you never exceed the designated time and stay financially smart;
It includes all-in-one tracking, from tracking billable hours with one click to monitoring essential leave hours (PTO, sick leave, overtime tracking, etc.). Timeular does it without the need for additional tools.
The best part about Timeular?
The Timeular’s time-tracking tracking cube, which comes as an addition to the software – it’s a unique physical tracking device that isn’t just practical, but it turns time tracking into an engaging activity, leading to more precise input.
TIP: Timeular is an excellent time-tracking software for marketing agencies.
Pricing:
Free 30-day trial
Personal: €6.30/month per user
Personal Pro: €9.60/month per user
Team: €14.60/month per user
Say goodbye to disjointed time and leave management AI tools. Timeular’s AI time entry suggestions, automated tracking, and smart productivity insights are linked within the same app.
Create content
Small businesses must use their thinly spread resources to the best of their ability. So, if you need to create content like social media posts, blog articles, or website landing pages, you need to look into AI tools for content creation.
By integrating AI tools to produce written content, you’ll save time that can be distributed to strategic endeavors, as writing is a tedious process.
Luckily, artificial intelligence made great leaps in its natural language processing capabilities and writes more like a human.
Jasper AI – writing tools for small businesses
The writing tool that addresses small business owners or marketing professionals’ distress in generating content ideas and skipping a blank page is Jasper.
It’s the fastest writing app I’ve used to date, and it promises to, in fact, help users generate content 10 times faster.
While it specializes in long-form content, you can find almost any social media content template, such as product descriptions and others.
Jasper’s key features:
Jasper scans your website and learns your brand, products, or services and tone of voice;
Produces content for a specific target audience based on your prompt;
It generates images, too, so you could benefit from content and imagery in one platform;
Gives you access to 50+ templates to get you started with minimal writing experience;
Integrates with Grammarly, SurferSEO, and Copyscape;
Its Extension, Jasper Everywhere, reads your texts across any platform and suggests edits or fills the rest of your text for you with its generative AI function;
Check out the best AI tools for marketers to discover 11 effective marketing tools that can be added to your toolkit.
Pricing:
No free plan: 7-day trial for paid plans
Creator: $49/month
Teams: $125/month
Business: Contact for pricing
Manage projects and tasks
The ‘teamwork makes the dream work’ saying resonates with small business owners more than it would affect a bigger business. Each and every team member in your organization adds to your growth and impact considerably.
Just like a task and project management tool that would impede your team from collaborating properly or would be too cumbersome to navigate.
The modus operandi of a PM system needs to allow small businesses to monitor progress at a glance and answer questions about projects without struggling.
Notion AI
Your projects are more than lists of tasks. They’re strategy documents, meeting notes, briefs, calls, and roadmaps. Notion interconnects all of them and helps you manage and access all data within one app in a less fragmented way.
With Notion, small businesses can plan, manage, and execute projects with more ease and at a lower price than PM tools, which don’t include such vast amounts of features.
Notion’s key features:
Access to countless free or paid templates for managing any type of project, from a simple Kanban board similar to Trello’s to writing articles within the app.
It helps your task management with its features that prioritize work based on urgency and importance, and new tasks are generated automatically once previous ones are done.
With its AskNotion command, it helps identify any information in your project’s database by pointing you to specific data points;
Generates automatic to-do lists and key takeaways based on meeting notes upon request;
Get AI-powered auto-fills with meeting summaries, follow-ups, or project updates. It even generates summaries of articles from the web with its Web Clipper.
Extracts insights from text-based data, analyzes data, and identifies common themes or patterns, allowing you to draw learnings from data efficiently.
Pricing:
Free plan
Plus: $8/month per user
Business: $15/month per user
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
For startups, Notion offers 6 months for free, with all features included, based on an application.
Write code with speed
As a small business owner, you know how tedious and time-consuming it is for your one or two developer teams to write test cases, sample data, and other repetitive tasks as such. So, an AI tool is a game-changer as you need to grow, but more often than you’d like, you lack resources on the dev side.
An artificial intelligence code pair will process data, save time, and shorten development cycles so you can launch that new feature before your competition.
At the same time, AI coding tools are designed to anticipate coding needs at a way faster speed than people would.
GitHub Copilot
GitHub Copilot is an AI pair programmer that has increased in popularity among developers and is an affordable option for small businesses.
It assists teams with coding suggestions in real-time based on countless lines of code stored in the GitHub repositories. It comes as a Visual Studio Code extension and suggests snippets and functions as one type.
It is one of the AI tools, and the more it is used, the more it learns your preferences with its machine learning algorithm.
GitHub Copilot’s key features:
Generates intelligent and alternative types of code tailored to a developer’s style, preferences, and usage patterns;
It’s versatile across a broad range of programming languages and frameworks, which makes it suitable for any developer;
Understands code context with the contextual code completion feature and produces relevant suggestions;
Spots bugs and style lapses, proposing amends for clean code outputs;
Integrates with Vim, Neovim, the JetBrains suite of IDEs, and others.
Pricing:
Free
Team: $3.67/month per user
Enterprise: $19.25/month per user
Manage your social media presence
In today’s climate, having a robust social media presence is non-negotiable for small businesses, especially if you’re aiming to carve out a significant niche in your industry.
Social media isn’t just a platform for broadcasting. It fosters engagement, brand building, and customer interactions while processing large amounts of data to deliver the right message for the right customer needs on the channel.
Beyond the remarkable functionalities of AI-driven social media tools, it’s important to remember that your brand’s unique voice and narrative will foster a loyal brand community.
FeedHive
As small business owners often juggle numerous tasks, streamlining your social media management into an all-in-one AI tool might solve many business challenges.
FeedHive allows you to effortlessly manage your content creation with an easy-to-navigate interface that condenses hours of work into just a few clicks.
It helps you lower costs and combines many other fragmented social media marketing tools into one.
It incorporates functionalities that other marketing tools have not yet, such as automation for creation, recycling content, monitoring, and posting.
FeedHive’s key features:
Auto-generates captivating posts using AI-generated suggestions;
Recycles and re-purposes high-performing content for higher customer engagement;
Triggers automatic follow-ups on trending posts that amplify your reach across all social platforms;
Includes predictive analytics and customer insights on post engagement, follower growth, or hashtag performance;
Suggests improvements in content and audience reach, saving time from data analysis.
Has an inbuilt AI chat with a trained AI ready to come up with ideas and enhance social media posts;
Pricing:
Creator: $15/month (up to 4 social accounts)
Brand: $22/month (up to 10 social accounts)
Business: $69/month (up to 100 social accounts)
Agency: $239/month (up to 500 social accounts)
Create video content at scale
Video gains more traction for a business’s social media strategy, of course, depending on your industry and niche, but if you consider video content to be something you’d need to implement, automate this process as much as possible.
Descript
Descript is a game changer for small business owners who may not have extensive experience in video production.
Imagine having your video content transcribed into a written script by an AI-powered tool. With Descript, that’s exactly what you get. The best functionality of Descript is when you’re editing the transcribed text—any changes you make to the script are automatically reflected in the video itself.
Simply cut, paste, or delete parts of your text script, and you (AI tools) will produce a polished video in a fraction of the time.
Descript’s key features:
Lets you create realistic-voice cloning voiceovers from written text based on its library of AI voices;
Converts your video and audio content into text scripts, perfect for repurposing content across social media posts, blogs, and more;
Lets you edit the transcript instead of the video, which requires technical skills – simply tweak the text transcript, and the AI will reflect it into your video;
For all the moments you want to correct something you said in a video – Descript’s Overdub feature allows you to do it – type the correct text and watch as it seamlessly translates back into your video’s audio.
Pricing:
Free plan available
Creator: $12 per month
Pro: $24 per month
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
Generate visual assets
One of the most important assets in marketing, and not only, are compelling visual assets like images and presentations used in pitching or for investors and other purposes.
With audiences increasingly drawn to visually appealing content, leveraging AI tools for design creation doesn’t just streamline the creative process—it becomes essential for standing out.
AI tools for image creation enable small businesses to stand out and convey their unique selling points and their brand’s story effectively.
Canva
Canva, one of the best AI tools for designers, is a game-changer for creating eye-catching social media graphics with minimal design investment. With its recent AI features, Canva now makes it easy for anyone to craft stunning visuals to a whole new level.
You don’t need to be a design pro; Canva’s user-friendly interface empowers anyone on your team to create professional-looking imagery quickly and effortlessly.
Canva’s key features:
Generate compelling images and presentations with simple text prompts to give your company a unique visual edge with Canva’s Magic Media feature;
Instantly revamp your visuals by altering elements within images with simple text commands, thanks to Magic Edit functionality;
Generate design templates from text queries or uploaded photos, streamlining your creation process.
Create Powerpoints with the AI generator; whether you need it for a board meeting or a client meeting, this revolutionary feature offers up-to-date templates.
Pricing:
Free Plan
Canva Pro: $14.99/month for a single user
Canva for Teams: $29.99/month for the first five users
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
Make accounting simpler
Digging through spreadsheets to analyze data and understand your business’s profitability should be taken off your list.
AI tools for accounting can learn over time how to organize and tag your accounting data, automating this manual process you might otherwise have to do it yourself or have a specialist handle it.
Zeni.ai
Zeni.ai is designed for small and medium-sized companies, automating bookkeeping and expense tracking with an AI-powered dashboard.
Zeni’s key features:
Gain a comprehensive overview of your financial activities in a dashboard tailored to give you a bird’s eye view of your finances;
Quickly digitize and organize your receipt data by simply sending it to a specific email address — Zeni’s AI will add it on record for you;
Easily compare financial performance across different time frames such as monthly, quarterly, and annually to spot trends and track growth;
Achieve better team collaboration by keeping them up to date automatically with alerts that sync across departments.
Pricing:
Starter: $549/month
Growth: $799/month
Enterprise: Contact for pricing
What to look for in an AI tool for small business
Before making your decision and implement AI to foster growth and keep up with any future trends, you need to assess the following:
Scalability: Don’t overlook the fact that as your business grows, your tools must grow with it, too. Before acquiring, assess the tool’s capability to expand alongside your business and surpass only the current needs of small businesses.
Integration: Operating your small business efficiently is pivotal. Make sure AI tools integrate smoothly with your existing infrastructure, such as project management apps, marketing tools, and others;
Data security: the more AI tools for small or bigger organizations appear, the higher the potential threats are. Double-check how AI tools prioritize your data security, compliance, and protection against potential threats.
Ease of use: Choosing a tool that doesn’t require extensive training and has a gradual learning curve will help your team get quickly on board, and you’ll benefit from results in
Price: Consider the return on investment over affordability. Choose tools that offer significant benefits without exceeding your budget but provide sustainable growth.
Conclusion
The integration of AI tools can augment human resources’ capabilities to a great extent, from intuitive time-tracking with Timeular to seamless content generation with Jasper AI. The democratization of AI offers affordable solutions to elevate your business, empowering you to foster sustainable growth.
The best advice is to implement tools that align with your vision and needs, whether for time management or task automation.
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