Generative AI does not belong just to the tech giants anymore. Thanks to huge advances in scalable cloud infrastructure, open-source tools, and APIs, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) have real opportunities for leveraging the power of AI to grow faster, work smarter, and provide better service to customers.
In this post, we’ll look at the tactical and impactful ways that SMBs can use generative AI to decrease manual workloads, automate communications, and give themselves a competitive edge.
Table of Contents
What Is Generative AI, Anyway?
Generative AI refers to AI models, such as GPT, DALL·E, and others, that can generate human-like content, including text, images, code, and audio, from simple prompts. Unlike traditional AI, where data is analyzed and newly generated, generative AI can create unique content based on your prompt,s allowing unprecedented levels of productivity and creativity for businesses.
The best part is you don’t need a whole team of data scientists to utilize it.
What Is Driving the Interest In Generative AI Among SMBs
Small businesses often operate with limited staff and budgets. Enterprises are using generative AI to allow for scale for automation and to personalize at scale. Businesses can now achieve the cost of a fraction of the cost of hiring or outsourcing standalones:
Here are the attributes driving acceptance:
- Time spent: automated tasks like content writing, customer replies etc.,
- Cost: Do more with limited resources
- Scale: drivers roll out to market, provide customer support, and internal tooling quickly
- Accessibility: You don’t need to be an AI specialist to start experimenting with AI
1. AI Chatbots are taking over customer support
One of the most tangible use cases for generative AI is customer service automation.
Businesses are using AI to support simple or repetitive inquiries and processes, instead of supporting just human agents in automated conversational modalities to support a customer’s needs, end-to-end. These bots are routinely supporting customers in the following ways:
- Use AI to provide answers to frequently asked questions (FAQs)
- Leverage AI to support the more mundane tasks, such as taking customer orders, performing basic troubleshooting, and providing 24/7 support.
- Have the AI automatically escalate complicated queries to human agents for a smooth customer service experience.
- Use AI to support customers’ needs instantly, which leads to higher customer satisfaction on the customer side.
- Use AI to reduce the costs of staffing for customer support.
Tools like AI Chatbot Development Services allow businesses to design an intelligent bot that is able to understand context and natural language, instead of simply canned responses.
2. Content Generation Without the Creative Fatigue
It can be a challenge for marketing teams to take those ideas and create documents consistently and in depth. The advancements in Generative AI help.
- Today’s AI tools can aid in:
- Writing blog posts and newsletters
- Writing accurate product descriptions
- Writing advertising copy
- Writing or rewriting existing documents for other formats
AI will not replace human creativity, but it will help your productivity by providing drafts, outlines, and revisions for your team to focus on messaging and strategy.
3. Automating Human Documentation
There is a lot of paperwork that can waste precious time. HR teams, sales managers, and Admins spend hours filling out or writing:
- Offer letters
- Meeting notes
- Proposals and Quotes
- On-boarding documents
Using generative AI, these summaries or reports can be created to predefined templates, using datasets, and personalized using templates.
Businesses using Generative AI Services can also have customized internal tools created to facilitate document workflows while maintaining brand compliance and legal documents.
4. Personal Shopping Experiences in E-Commerce
Many e-commerce brands are utilizing generative AI in their business systems, already creating hyper-personalized shopping experiences that have legitimate results.
Stop-overs for generative AI are:
- Creating unique product descriptions for thousands of individual SKUs
- Recommending products or content based on user behavior
- Producing and sending personalized discount email campaigns
- Translating content for different markets
By inserting generative AI into your e-commerce ecosystem, you can deliver that personalized experience without adding staff to the marketing team (or tech team) through tools developed by companies
5. AI-Assisted Coding and IT Processes
Developers are already working in small IT teams, and AI co-pilots are changing how developers work.
With generative models as the core technology being used by the developer, like OpenAI Codex, a developer can:
- Generate boilerplate code automatically
- Receive bug suggestions in real-time
- Auto-document their code
- Produce internal scripts faster than they could regularly
Generative AI will not replace a developer; rather, it is being placed into a role that will help the team run faster, write cleaner, and create fewer bugs.
Any business creating AI-powered internal apps or tools should work with a Generative AI development company to ensure that the final solutions are custom, scalable, and secure.
6. Smarter Email and Sales Outreach
Generative AI can help small sales teams:
- Create cold outreach emails
- Summarise long customer email threads
- Concatenate follow-up responses
- Personalise sales outreach based on company profiles
AI-assisted sales tools can also improve response rates and streamline your process so you can spend more time building relationships with customers (twelve or so less emails to write each month)
Getting Started: SMB Specifics
You don’t need to embark on an overhaul of your entire tech stack or bring in the AI engineers just yet to get started. Here are a few ways small businesses can start to safely and intelligently apply generative AI to their business:
- Start with one use case: Identify the scope for just one use case (e.g. support or content generation)
- Use trusted tools: Start with products like ChatGPT, Jasper, or Claude for the few basic things
- Maintain your security: Be cautious about putting sensitive data into public AI tools, and consider building your own solution
- Find a trusted professional: Don’t try to reinvent the wheel, work with a trusted/recognisable provider to build your own custom workflows
Final Thoughts
Generative AI isn’t a fad, it’s a revolution in the way businesses engage and operate. Small and mid-sized businesses have an unprecedented opportunity scale their operations, become more efficient, and innovate their business faster than they ever have before.
Even if it’s in the form of automating your customer service, personalising your e-commerce solution, or simply speeding up your internal processes, the tools are now available for you to do it.