AI is being quickly adopted within the tech sphere, but many small businesses are still sleeping on the potential of integrating AI into their business because they are intimidated, don't know how to select good tasks for AI to help with, or just don't think AI is applicable to their "type" of business.
In this article we will show you 10 ways (including example bots) any small business can integrate AI to save time, increase, efficiency, filling skill gaps and more, all through the lens of a small company you typically wouldn't associate with AI.
Head's up, Angela and Cake My Day aren't real people or businesses, they've been invented purely for illustrative purposes
Meet Angela from "Cake My Day", a small cup cake store in Newquay, Cornwall.
Angela's eyes sparkled as she gazed out at the rolling waves of Newquay, Cornwall. It had been six months since she'd left her high-stress city job to open "Cake My Day," her dream cupcake shop in this picturesque coastal town. While business was booming, Angela found herself spending more time in the kitchen than on her surfboard. The constant demands of being a solo entrepreneur were taking their toll, and she wondered if she'd ever find the perfect work-life balance she'd envisioned.
One particularly busy afternoon, as Angela was frantically answering emails, taking orders, and trying to frost a batch of sea-salt caramel cupcakes, she overheard two customers chatting about how AI was revolutionising their small businesses. Intrigued, she decided to explore how this technology could help her ride the wave of success while actually getting back on the waves she loved.
1. Generating product descriptions
Angela had always struggled with words and always found the copy she wrote for social media, her website or wherever else boring, and it certainly didn't do her quite frankly phenomenal cupcakes justice. She dreaded trying to describe her creations in a captivating way when positing to social media.
Sick of her lacklustre cupcake descriptions, she built a custom bot where she could upload photos of a new cake, and the bot would give it a mouth watering name and description far better than anything she could come up with.
Try her cupcake description bot below (use the image below if you like, or any other suitable cupcake)👇
This bot saves Angela precious time describing her cupcakes but hopefully you could see how something similar could help any business with descriptions for products or estate agents with property descriptions etc.
2. Customer support
Angela likes to leave her phone at home when she goes surfing, but recently she hasn't felt like she could do that because she's inundated with customers emailing her the same questions over and over again. "Do your cakes contain nuts?", "How long does an order take", "Can I check the status of my order".
She thought adding and FAQ section to her Shopify site would help but it appears no one looks at it!
Since then she's add a customer support bot to her site and it now handles 90% of her customer queries, and can even do things like look up shipping statuses for orders. The bot knows everything about her business, she trained it on the content on her website, its available 24/7, and if there's a question it can't answer it escalates the request her anyway.
Try her support bot below:
3. Generating content for her website
Angela has been reading about SEO and thinks it would be a good idea to create some SEO landing pages on her site. Pages like "Cupcakes for weddings", "Cupcakes for birthdays", "Cupcakes for baby showers".
The thought of having to write content manually for each of those pages fills her with dread so she creates a bot that can generate content for her website pages using her desired tone of voice while make use of the page builder component types she has available to build out pages in her CMS.
Using her new bot she's able to create 30 new pages in day, not only that but the copywriting is far better than anything she could have produced herself!
Give it a go yourself below:
4. Brainstorming new product ideas
When Angela first started Cake My Day 6 months ago she had a huge backlog of cupcake ideas but she has quickly exhausted them. She's hit baker's block, and it struggling to come up with new unique ideas. That was true until she created her "Cupcake ideas" bot that could help her brainstorm and refine ideas.
The bot knows all of her previous recipes and now she can simply ask things like "Come up with some unique halloween themed cupcake ideas" and she'll be presented with a number of ideas to get her creative juices flowing, and she can go back and forth to refine ideas with the bot. Bye bye baker's block.
Try below:
5. Personalised cold outreach
Angela is thinking of more ways to get her business exposure and thinks there is potential to partner with local businesses that hold events like weddings etc.
She plans to cold email list of local event venues but the only problem is she absolutely sucks at writing emails. Not to worry, she creates a bot where she provides it a link to the target businesses website, the bot does its research on the business, and then drafts a cold email personalised to that business and how they could collaborate with Cake My Day.
Using her cold outreach bot Angela is able to send 50 really high quality personalised emails to her targeted business in a morning.
Try it below:
6. Internal knowledge bots
Angela is a solo business owner at the moment, but she has aspirations to expand so has been building up her company workspace in Notion. It contains all her recipes, processes, supplier information, instructions on how to handle support queries, post orders and more. This will be invaluable when she add to her team.
In fact, she's done such a good job of documenting here business that its becoming hard for her to find things sometimes. To solve this she's created a bot that use's her Notion workspace as its knowledge base so she can ask it any question and get results back instantly. "I've run out of flour, whats the number of Cornwall baking supplies", "Whats the recipe for my ice cream deluxe cupcake".
Try it below:
7. Marketing ideas
Angela's cup cake business is going well, but baking is her strong point, not marketing. She knows marketing is important, but often struggle to know where she should be focusing her marketing efforts.
To help with this she now has an awesome marketing ideas bot that knows everything about her business and can help her brainstorm marketing ideas and campaigns thats are completely bespoke to Cake My Day.
Try below:
8. Writing newsletters
Angela's best mate Craig keeps banging on about "how newsletter are all the rage at the moment, and she should really start a newsletter for her customers to keep the up to date with everything Cake My Day".
She get's why its a good idea, but the idea of having to write even more content makes her feel sick. She quickly remembers that she can just create another bot to help her do this and the "Cupcake Chronicles" newsletter bot is born.
Now all she has to do is outline some top level points for each newsletter and the bot drafts the rest. A few small tweaks and its ready to send. She notices a huge uptake in return customers after launching her newsletter.
Give the newsletter generation bot a go below:
9. Workflow automation and 10. data extraction
(Two in one, its not cheating we promise, its two seperate things, extracting data, and using it as part of a workflow by saving to Notion.)
All businesses have some very boring receptive tasks that owners dread. For Angela that storing and recording her ingredient expense receipts. She was sick of the piles of paper receipts clogging up her desk, she built a bot that will file and organise them into a nice neat searchable Notion table for her.
All she has to do is upload a snap of the receipt and the bot extracts all the important informations and adds it to here Notion table (see an example here) where she can find all her receipts in one place.
and here's her receipt database in Notion:
This has worked so well she's thinking of making another bot that works in a similar way for the mountains of snail mail she receives!
Try the bot with your own receipts here:
More time for surfing
Six months after implementing these AI solutions, "Cake My Day" had become the talk of Newquay. Angela's cupcakes were in high demand for weddings and events across Cornwall. Best of all, she was finally living her dream – running a successful business while having plenty of time to surf.
As she paddled out one golden afternoon, watching the sun dip towards the horizon, Angela smiled. Thanks to embracing AI, she had truly found her perfect balance – serving up sweet treats and catching sweet waves in equal measure.
The story of "Cake My Day" provides a great example of how with a little creativity and the right technology, small business owners can have their cake and eat it too.
By leveraging AI, entrepreneurs like Angela can optimise their operations, enhance customer experiences, and find more time to pursue their passions. So, whether you're running a bakery, a boutique, or any small business, consider how AI might just be the secret ingredient to your success and satisfaction.
Hopefully this post has inspired you to start exploring how you can integrate AI into your business, and if it is we would love to help! You can create a free account on Chat Thing and start creating bots, or if you want some customised help figuring out exactly where and how AI can integrate with your business, chat to us over at Pixelhop for AI consulting.