The exploding era of AI is giving small businesses new ways to compete, scale, and operate more efficiently. With its soaring popularity and news headlines about the millions of dollars being spent by large enterprises on AI, small businesses too are starting to drive a significant share of AI usage to improve their operating efficiency, their productivity, and their customer engagements.

While a commitment to AI isn’t the same as AI adoption, implementing generative AI (Gen AI) can be a simple step that gives your small businesses a competitive edge – because of how readily AI can be to implement. The good news is, by implementing Gen AI into everyday processes and tasks, small businesses can easily streamline operations, boost productivity, and automate repetitive tasks while still focusing on creative ways to grow their business top line. Here’s four simple ways to get started with using Gen AI in your business that can help you scale.

Simple ways to start using Gen AI in your business

• Customer service: Adding an AI Chatbot to your website for handling routine customer service can provide your business with immediate 24/7 customer support, answering customers’ common questions, resolving customer issues, and making product or service recommendations for your customers. Implementing an website AI Chatbot, for instance, can quickly allow you to create a process to handle everyday customer inquiries, route calls, or capture online leads, around the clock, without having to immediately build or expand a customer service team.

• Marketing activities: Many small businesses are tapping into Gen AI, like Chat GPT, to help create marketing collateral, designs, and website landing pages. Using Gen AI creative tools can enable small businesses to easily create company newsletters, personalized content, and customer email drafts. Gen AI, for example, could be used to help generate subject lines for customer emails campaigns or captions for social media posts to enhance customer engagements. But ensure any AI generated content be aligned with your company branding and messaging as it could confuse your customers or make your business look identical to your competitors.

• Automating administrative work: To help automate processes and tasks, Gen AI can help teams with data entry or contract processing and reviewing. For instance, you can identify Gen AI processes to help reduce or eliminate manual data entry work by having AI extract certain words or texts from documents and have them auto-populate into fields across other software systems.

• AI-generated virtual meeting summaries: Meetings can be a time-consuming activity for many small businesses. With Gen AI meeting assistant tools, conversations and notes from meetings can be automatically transcribed in real time, with key decisions captured and summaries made available immediately after a call ends. For example, instead of spending valuable time after meetings sharing updates, creating follow-on action items, or creating follow-up emails with your team, Gen AI meeting assistance tools can handle those tasks for you.

AI is changing the possibilities for small businesses and is very adaptable. IBM describes Gen AI as, “artificial intelligence that can create original content such as text, images, video, audio or software code in response to a user’s prompt or request.” To optimize your implementation of Gen AI, look first at where you spend the most time and resources, then start implementing AI there to free up more time to focus on things that contribute to the company’s growth.

As you are implementing Gen AI, remember that it doesn’t replace human intelligence – it is a force multiplier tool. At the end of the day, AI should not be thought of as a way to replace, but as a way to supplement the work you and your team are already doing to scale your small business.