Artificial intelligence can save time and money, especially for smaller businesses with limited resources. You can speed up and even automate routine tasks, from capturing receipts to planning tasks. Here are tips to get started and five business services with AI tools.
Tips to start using AI
How would AI fit into your business? AI tools have incredible potential, but their success depends on your requirements and budget. Adding AI can be quick but could require extra time and training. It will change how you do things, so you need space to adapt. Being prepared will avoid frustration and wasted effort.
Before committing any money and resources to an AI-powered service, make a list of requirements and expectations.
Here are some steps to develop your requirements:
- Track your time for one week, writing down every task and how long it takes.
- Highlight repetitive tasks you do more than once a week in the same way.
- Determine how much time the tasks consume and what the hourly cost would be.
- Decide what a completed task looks like.
- Set aside time to explore services and study their tutorials.
- Try out services through trials or pay for a month.
Ready to try out AI in your business? Here are use cases, plus recommended services.
For Microsoft software: Copilot
Many businesses rely on Microsoft 365, an affordable suite of business tools such as email, calendars, word processing, spreadsheets, slideshows, and customer management. Now, these have access to the Copilot AI.
Copilot can handle various tasks. In Outlook, it can generate summaries of email threads and generate responses for emails. It can help organise and write documents in Word, and generate formulas and graphs in Excel. Copilot also integrates with Teams to transcribe meetings and create summaries. Microsoft 365’s business licenses include Copilot, but may need an administrator to activate it on user accounts.
For meetings and transcriptions: Otter
Taking notes during meetings can be very distracting, which is why AI transcription services have become a common sight in meetings. Otter.ai is one of the most popular transcribers.
If you have a recording of the conversation, upload it to Otter and the AI will produce a written version in minutes. You can also share the meeting link with Otter; it will join the meeting to record and transcribe the conversation. Need Otter in every meeting? Connect it to your work calendar, and it will join every time. Otter will generate a complete transcription, as well as meeting notes and a summary. It can even attend meetings when you are not there.
For task management: Trello
Whether running tasks personally or across a team, task management services are invaluable to every smooth-running business. Trello is a leader among affordable and intuitive business task management software, and it has a great AI included in its pro package.
Trello’s AI provides several timesaving features. It can suggest steps for a task—describe the task’s purpose and outcome and the AI creates a list of steps. It can generate descriptions for the cards that represent tasks, and summarise tasks and communications sent inside Trello. Perhaps the best feature is that Trello’s AI can look at text, such as meeting notes, and extract action items for tasks.
For image design: Canva + Affinity
Every business needs designed materials like business cards, brochures, and images for websites and social media. Canva makes it very affordable and easy to create such collateral.
Canva’s website provides many excellent design tools for free. It also offers Affinity, which is free Photoshop-level design and image software for Windows or Mac computers. Canva’s paid version adds thousands of free photos, clip art, and templates that make design even faster and easier. It also has very useful AI tools that generate new images, selectively erase things in an image, replace backgrounds, and much more. Canva’s AI tools help ordinary users do things only design professionals could once handle.
For business accounting: Sage
Bookkeeping is essential but often a burden, requiring regular attention and time to manage routine and repetitive tasks. Artificial intelligence shines at handling those tasks, which is why accounting software services like Sage have added AI features.
The AI in Sage can handle time-demanding tasks. For example, it scans submitted documents such as receipts, invoices, and statements to extract information and add it to ledgers. It can also track invoices, reconcile payments, and spot errors. Sage AI also generates financial reports and automates specific bookkeeping workflows.
