How AI can help my small business?

Nowadays AI is everywhere. 

It's the trend of the moment and there's this feeling that if you don't start it, you'll miss out.

Like it was with computers and fax machines in the late 1980s (you had to computerize your business or at least have a fax number), the Internet, email and websites in the late 1990s (you had to have a website for your business) and Content Creation and sharing, aka Social Media, blogging and video in the late 2000s (you had to have social media profiles and at least a blog). Then in the last 2010s it was all about Online sales, remote working, gig economy and turning everything into subscription based, (thanks to a pandemic, everything has to be remotely operated). 

Today is AI (Artificial Intelligence) the new fad of the time. It gets everywhere: in your Google Search results, in your Word and Excel documents, in your emails, on your browsing experience...

The other day I caught my 13 years old son using AI to do his maths homework. All it took was to use the right app, take a picture with his phone of the problem on the computer screen and in seconds it provided the full reasoning to the answer. I was impressed and shocked at the same time. And felt old too. It was like me at his age when I figured out how to program the video recorder while my father watched impressed by how I managed to understand the latest tech so quickly.

The lesson for me here is that he figured out the main thing as entrepreneurs we need to keep in mind: AI is just a tool and as a tool it's there to solve problems. 

I keep hearing big corporations employees trying to figure out how to implement AI in their company so they can claim they've jumped on the bandwagon. Most of the AI ideas I hear about seem to create more problems than they solve. 

Let's see how AI can help you and your business, in the perspective that AI is there to make your life easier and the machine is supposed to work for you and not the other way around.  

1. Meet AI and get to know each other.

First of all, I'd recommend to get familiar with AI, as a hobby. On your day off or in the evenings, spend some time to watch a few videos on Youtube about what is AI. Focus on the most recent ones and the most popular. If you're not sure which ones to watch, ask your son to prepare you a curated list of the best ones to cover the basics. 

Then go play with the chat versions of some free to use AI interfaces, like ChatGPT or any other free ones: CoPilot (Microsoft), Gemini (made by Google).

After a few sessions playing with it, you will have a sense of what's all about and will probably be mildly impressed by its results, like I was. But that's mainly because those AI chat tools are configured by default to talk to a 12 years old person. See further below how to remediate that.  

Alternatively, you can buy a course on Udemy for less than £15 ($20) you can access some of very well crafted courses that will fill you up on the topic in less than a month.

If you have no time for that, find it. Or ask someone to do it for you and brief you on the essentials. 

There are no excuses today to ignore this topic.

2. It's all in the prompt.

A prompt is the question you are typing into the chat box that contains a question or request for information or processing of data that AI will respond to. So you type a prompt and AI respond to it. So it works as in real life: junk in, junk out. 

The best advise I got from what we call now a Prompt Engineer, is that you can get the wildest thing from AI depending on how you're asking. 

In a nutshell, once you've learned to craft your prompt properly, you'd have the impression to talk to an expert on pretty much anything. You'll have to begin by asking the AI tool to act as an expert on the domain you want to talk about, giving as much details as you want.

The good thing with AI is that you can keep asking. And if you don't know how to ask, you can even ask how to write your prompt for the desired result. 

There are enough content on the Internet now to cover that topic that I'll let you find out by yourself.

3. What AI can do for you.

As my son already found out, AI is there so solve problems, not to create them.

So the first question to ask is: "what is the problem ?" and then to describe it.

Most if us entrepreneurs are lacking time. Time is literally the scarcest resource available to us. Therefore, the first area AI could help you is to help you saving time. 

Have a look at your most time consuming tasks and think "what if I'd have a virtual assistant helping me completing that task more efficiently?"

There a few examples:

Writing letters, emails and messages. If your business requires a lot of interactions with customers, authorities and suppliers, you'll have to write a lot of correspondence. Instead of reinventing the wheel or using the same pre-set templates over and over, give AI a try. Gather the data you need to include in your letter, explain the expected outcome, the tone, the style, etc and see AI working its magic. It would help you immensely when you have to write under huge emotional stress. This AI could have saved your ass when you had to write that very angry email that you regretted later sending.

Speech to text capabilities: Dictate your quotes on the go and convert them into written offers in no time. Let's say you visit a customer to give a quote about some renovation work, cleaning services or garden maintenance contract. Use your phone to record your voice when you do the walkthrough and at the end, send it to an AI chat session asking to convert it into a formal quote using the template provided. With some tweaking, you'll reach a level of productivity never seen before.

Data Analysis: that's where AI has the most to offer. Give a large set of data and ask to extract what you want: a report , patterns, forecasts, etc. For example, as a restaurant, I had submitted the history of delivery orders of the pas 4 years for AI to analyse and detect patterns. Usually it would have taken me a week to analyse the file using Excel spreadsheets. In a couple of hours, I had identified the most regular customers, their orders patterns, calculated the attrition rate and crafter a plan to re-engage the lost customers. I found seasonality in who ordered, what was ordered and what where the best sellers by month, day of the week or holiday periods. Once fed with the right data and a clear explanation of what is expected, my expectations were over exceeded. 

Market monitoring: too busy to keep an eye on what competition does and publish on their social media? AI can help you in there too. On a regular basis, you can train AI to provide you with a curated  selection of media content, ensuring you never miss a critical information. Get up to date with current trends and get AI to scan the media landscape to pinpoint what's worth your attention.

 Improvement, enhancements and optimisation: I know, it's hard to be told what we're doing wrong. It's even harder when you know you can do better and have to pay a consultant thousands of pounds (or dollars) to be told what we do wrong. Instead, you can turn AI as your personal consultant. A simple example, for the same restaurant I worked with: I submitted the menu to AI asking to compare with standard practice in that  niche and telling me what's missing, what can be improved, and what we can add to get to the top of their competitors. The result was surprising and interesting. AI can also used for optimisation in many areas: stock management, timetables and schedules, profitability, wastage reduction, ... you name it.

Social media planner: Nowadays, social media (SM) is inevitable. Not only it is expected to have a presence in there, but you have to publish content regularly. Content on SM fades very quickly. Once a week is a bare minimum. Unless you have staff handling it, regularly publishing content can be dauting. AI can help you there by: suggesting content ideas, turning those ideas into content and the most efficient way to do it. At the end you can get a SM planning with weekly posts topics that requires nothing else than a 15 minute video shot from your phone that AI will turn into a blog post, a YouTube video, a few YouTube short, some TikTok videos and Instagram reels and stories, an Instagram post, a Facebook post and story, several tweets on X, ... you see the point ? 

Ideation tool: if you run out of inspiration and ideas to run your business, a chat with AI could open bright new horizons. It's like having a brainstorming session with the most heteroclite crowd in your meeting room, except that's on your screen. Ask AI to pretend to act as if it was this or that type of person before asking its input. That's all in the prompt.

Customer Service Interactions: that's a solution that's being quickly and widely implemented by big Corporations: the use of AI in the customers interactions : online in chat boxes and even by telephone. I don't mind it being used as dynamic FAQ that will help your customers to find the most obvious answers by themselves but keep in mind that people hate interacting with a robot. They are cringy and they're just an opportunity for your customer to discover they're suffering from automatonophobia. 

However it was funny to see the earlier version of the robot chat starting to go nuts in their conversations with some customers. That was due to the early blips and bugs and those are mostly corrected by now. 

Customer acquisition and marketing: AI can certainly get to help you to gain new customers. It can help you define new strategies to acquire new customers, especially those that are underused by your competitor. We start to see AI using telephone to start engaging with potential customers to quickly trim the dead wood on a prospect file so you can focus on what's really worth your time to increase your chances to close customers. You can use AI to clean your email list, your phone list and address books. It can help you to quickly design customer surveys and deploy them among your customers for quick feedback. 

Financial and Management Accounting: AI can significantly reduce the time spent to clerical work in accounting. On top of my head I think of: Invoices input, bank reconciliations, Fixed assets and inventory management, taxes returns, payroll operations, provisions and accruals and controls. AI can perform basic audits of books in real time. On the management accounting side, it can work marvels and provide most of the reports about actual data, forecasts, budgets, consumptions and variance analysis. AI based controls will provide better level of financial security in the books. AI is already used for half a decade by consulting companies to detect inefficiencies, wastages of resources and fraud.  

I started my career as a corporate accountant, so I know how scary it may sound. However, since most of the companies use large proprietary ERPs, I expect AI implementation to take a while to be fully effective. However, I am also well aware that all accountants are the most avid users of excel spreadsheets and that's where AI can really help to make their lives easier. 

However, I must precise that AI cannot fully replace an educated professional human mind. It's a tool and should remain a tool. Maybe more in the accounting area than other, it is imperative to have a human supervision of the AI outputs at all time. 

And finally if you don't know how Artificial Intelligence can help you in your business, why not asking AI? Provide a clear description of your business, and simply ask how it can help you achieving the goal you have described ? 

It's all in the prompt, man ! 

AI in practice

To write this article, I still used my natural intelligence, but I used AI to:

• Proofread the article for typos, grammar and consistency. the help was appreciated.
• Generate images for illustration.
• Create an SEO-optimized meta description for the article.

I used Gemini and Copilot to do so. The 2 first images were generated by Gemini, the two last ones by Copilot. 

Here are a few of my practical insights from using AI::

• Never treat AI’s first result as final unless it’s perfect. Prompting is an iterative process; don't hesitate to rephrase, refine and add more details to enhance the next iteration. Since you're not paying pay per hour, you can refine it as many as times as needed.
• Make sure to allocate enough time at the beginning to experiment with it. Learning to prompt is like learning a foreign language. Practice makes perfect. If I was able to use AI within one hour, I was better after spending 10 hours doing it and plan to get even better when I will have clocked 100 hours and more. The first article I wrote using AI as an assistant, I spent 3 times more than usual, but now I spend 2/3 of the time I used to. So,
• Don't expect immediate results. There is a learning curve and maybe some mistakes to be done along the way. If you want to go quick, you can still call for help from a Prompt or AI Engineer that will come at a cost. Most people improve significantly after their first 10–20 hours of experimentation. (Suggested AI input).
• Don't fall into the rabbit hole. Playing with AI can end up like a teenager discovering TikTok. Get a clear view of what you expect and stick to it during the iteration process. 
• If you're not happy at all with the outcome, close the session and start again. Or use a different AI agent. AI agents work in sessions, and their memory is erased when you close them. Sometimes the history of a session is going in so many directions that it pollutes the coming outputs. In that case, flush the cache and start again.
• There is no bad answers, only bad questions. This adage has never been more true with AI. If the quality of the output is not as good as you expected, that's because the prompt was not designed to do so. The result will not be anything else that the prompt asked for. You want something? Ask for it. If you don't ask properly, you don't get. 
• Keep learning! There is no bad experience with AI, only learning opportunities. The other day, I have spent 6 hours trying to get AI to built a micro website for me, only to get a poor result. I could have said that I have wasted my time. Instead I choose to see all what I have learned during that time. Learning a skill is not only acquiring the knowledge of what to do right, it's also getting to know what not to do wrong. 

Good luck playing with AI ! If you have a question or a comment, don't hesitate to post it below.