Business can be tough. Besides the obvious economic challenges, there are a number of underlying costs and skills needed to get the most out of your small enterprise. Likewise, taking the step to create something from scratch has its own inherent list of challenges.
Aside from the physical development of your product or service, getting your business out there requires a number of specialist skill sets, from general consulting to design and copywriting, right up to photography, and even videography.
Thankfully, artificial intelligence is here to help fill in a few of those gaps.
What is Artificial Intelligence?
You’ve already experienced AI in some form or another. Spell Check on your computer or smartphone is one example.
In its most basic form, artificial intelligence is the simulation of human intelligence processes, using computer power. This can include things like language translation, speech-to-text automation, or even image creation and sound design.
AI systems work by analysing the large amounts of data that is freely available across the world wide web, finding and labeling patterns to make “intelligent” predictions. This basically means AI can learn to identify and describe objects or prompts by using text, imagery, or other media.
Moreso, AI can be used to automate mundane tasks done by humans, including customer service interaction, lead generation, and even fraud detection. While this kind of technology might sound like it's out of reach for the normal, everyday person, most AI tools are readily available and easy to use – for free!
5 Free-to-use AI Solutions for Small Businesses
Choose a Business Name with NamingMagic
So, you’ve been trading for a little while now using word-of-mouth and you're looking to take the next step with getting marketing material, business cards, and a website done. But before that happens, you’ll be needing a name and, probably a logo.
NamingMagictakes the stress out of choosing a name and can even assist you with a website domain. It was designed by two seasoned entrepreneurs who have spent hours debating, brainstorming, and domain-searching company names.
It also works great as a thought starter, so even if its suggestions aren’t quite perfect, it might just spark an idea.
Create a Logo with Looka
Once you have your naming done, you can take it over toLookaand generate a logo based on a number of inputs, like your business slogan, industry, and colour scheme.
Looka combines your design preferences with AI to generate several options for you, which you can choose to develop further, or simply download the one that works best. It will even allow you to preview what it looks like on business cards, t-shirts, and more.
Need some help with building your brand? Check out our free content plan template!
Build a Website in 30 secs with Durable
Building a website is quite a daunting undertaking if you go at it yourself. While there are some great and easy-to-use web-building platforms like Squarespace or Wix, they still require a little web design know-how to get perfectly right.
Luckily, AI tools likeDurabletake the pain – and time – out of web design in less time than it took to read this sentence. No, really. Durable can churn out a functioning website in under 30 seconds.
It works by using your location, and the nature and name of your business as prompts. It then scours its own database for best practices within those parameters and generates all the framework of a website in record time.
After creating an account – which, we admit, isn’t technically free – you can customise your website further with drag-and-drop tools, to add your own logo, photos, and text.
Need a website? Read our beginners' guide to getting started.
Ask Questions and Generate Text with ChatGPT
ChatGPT has been spoken about a lot in the media of late, thanks to its almost human-like ability to answer questions, have conversations and generate expertly written essays, emails, and even digital code.
The way ChatGPT works is pretty complicated to explain without going into very technical detail, but it basically works by digesting a huge amount of text data from the internet, like e-books, articles, and websites, and has trained itself to mimic the language used.
Take Notes Automatically with Fireflies
With all the creative stuff taken care of, perhaps you’re needing something a little more day-to-day, like taking notes during Zoom meetings.
Fireflies is an AI meeting assistant that helps you record, transcribe, search, and analyse voice conversations across any web-conferencing platform, like Microsoft Teams or Zoom. The best part is that Fireflies has an easy-to-use search function, which enables you to review hour-long calls in less than 5 minutes.
This means that you can easily find or revisit a sentence, without needing to troll through hours of recordings or try to remember who said what.
Welcome to the Future
AI is revolutionising the way we do business, from marketing to operations to sales. It saves time on monotonous tasks and improves productivity.
It’s little wonder then that hundreds of businesses are using AI to perform functions that not only save them money but also save time.
After all, every small business can use a helping hand. Even an artificial one.
