
Demystifying Automation: How Small Businesses Can Leverage AI for Growth
Key takeaways
- Though simple automations are very common in business, advancements in AI have made automations more complex and exciting.
- Small businesses can benefit from these in several ways – including social media management, financial organisation, and a wide range of operational processes.
- A learning curve is inevitable, and creativity is needed. But small businesses that invest in automations set themselves up for growth and streamlined efficiency.
Automations have been around for a while, but they’re getting smarter and more sophisticated by the week. What’s exciting is how these advances are opening doors for small businesses to cut down their operating costs dramatically.
This article delves into the world of AI automations, showing how small businesses can use them to their advantage. We’ll break down how automations work, explore the tools you can use to create them, and highlight some complex processes they can simplify.
Whether you’re new to automations or looking to deepen your understanding, you’re in the right place.
How small businesses can benefit from automations
Small businesses face a unique set of challenges, often revolving around resource constraints, scaling operations, and maintaining customer satisfaction. AI-driven automations can offer powerful solutions to these challenges, enabling small businesses to operate more efficiently, make data-driven decisions, and improve customer experiences.
Here are several examples of ways AI automations can help small businesses grow:
1. Streamlining operations
Small businesses often have limited staff, making it difficult to manage all operations effectively.
AI can automate routine tasks such as scheduling, invoicing, and email responses. This frees up time for employees to focus on more strategic tasks. For instance, AI chatbots can handle basic customer inquiries 24/7.
2. Customer insights and personalisation
Understanding and engaging customers in a personalised way, though highly effective, can be resource-intensive.
AI algorithms can analyse customer data to identify patterns, preferences, and behaviours. This information can be used to personalise marketing messages, recommend products, and enhance the customer experience, leading to increased loyalty and sales without compromising a team member’s time.
3. Marketing and social media management
Small businesses might not have the resources for extensive marketing campaigns or constant social media engagement.
AI-powered tools can automate content creation, ad targeting, and social media posts. They can also analyse the effectiveness of different strategies, helping businesses optimise their marketing efforts for better ROI.
4. Sales and CRM automation
Managing leads and maintaining relationships with customers can be overwhelming without a dedicated sales team.
AI can help in scoring leads, predicting which customers are most likely to convert, and automating follow-up communications. This ensures that small businesses can focus their efforts on the most promising opportunities.
5. Financial management
Keeping track of finances, including invoicing, payroll, and budgeting, requires significant effort and can lead to errors if done manually.
AI-driven financial tools can automate many aspects of financial management, from categorising expenses and predicting cash flow issues to automating payroll and flagging unusual transactions that might indicate fraud.
6. Supply chain optimisation
Managing inventory and the supply chain can be complex, with risks of overstocking or stockouts.
AI can forecast demand more accurately, optimise inventory levels, and identify the most efficient delivery routes. This helps small businesses reduce costs and improve customer satisfaction through timely deliveries.
7. Talent acquisition and HR
Hiring and retaining the right talent is crucial but can be time-consuming for small businesses.
AI HR tools can automate parts of the recruitment process, from screening resumes to scheduling interviews. They can also help in identifying employee engagement levels and predicting turnover, aiding staff retention strategies.
Common automations
Automations aren’t new. Most businesses already use basic automations and have done so for years. Some of the most common uses for automations include:
- The email autoresponder – this is used to send immediate messages to customers to confirm orders, welcome them to a mailing list, accept job applications, and acknowledge enquiries.
- Automatic invoices – many businesses generate invoices upon the completion of a sale, sending receipts and order confirmations.
- Social media posting – for several years businesses and individuals have been able to automate their social media activity, based on a schedule they choose.
- Scheduling and appointments – this type is commonly used when clients book appointments, which go directly into a business’s calendar. Companies can also automate appointment reminders.
Complex automations
Though these common automations are very useful, automated operations can get a lot more creative. The advent of several digital tools and developments in AI have allowed automations to become more complex, solving bigger problems for small businesses:
- Triaging customer enquiries – AI can help analyse incoming customer queries, categorising them into groups based on urgency, topic, and sentiment. This allows tickets to be assigned to the appropriate team member and ensures severe issues are dealt with quickly.
- Inventory management – tools can be set up to monitor stock levels, automatically reorder products, and check the cost of products across multiple different suppliers to get the best price.
- Lead scoring – businesses can create systems that automatically score leads based on criteria like demographics, behaviour, and engagement level. Sales efforts can then be focused on the highest-scoring leads.
- Financial reconciliation – automation tools can crosscheck transaction details (i.e., bank statements, invoices, and accounting records). This process can reduce errors and save a significant amount of time.
- Employee onboarding – new hires can receive welcome emails and information for necessary training automatically.
- Dynamic pricing – e‑commerce businesses can use algorithms that automatically adjust product pricing based on real-time factors (e.g., demand, competitor pricing, and inventory levels).
There are literally countless ways you can utilise AI and automations. Whatever operational issues your business may have, you’ll likely be able to create an automated solution with AI. To execute your ideas and create helpful automations, however, you’ll need a tool.
Best automation tools
There are several automation tools on the market, each with their own benefits and uses:
Zapier
Zapier is incredibly popular for automating workflows between web applications. It connects over 3,000 apps and allows users to create automations (called “Zaps”) that can automate tasks between different apps without the need for coding. For example, you could set up a Zap to automatically save email attachments to Dropbox or add new email contacts to a CRM system.
IFTTT (If This Then That)
Similar to Zapier, IFTTT is another web-based service that enables users to create chains of simple conditional statements, known as “applets”. These applets can automate tasks between different internet-connected services and devices. It’s commonly used for both personal and business purposes, such as posting the same content across multiple social media platforms or automating smart office devices.
OpenAI API
OpenAI’s various tools allow a lot of creativity for making automations. A Chat API can be trained on external databases such as your company product or customer data. For example, you could train a customer service chatbot on your business’s products, enhancing its ability to answer queries.
You could create an Assistant with OpenAI’s products to regularly scrape the web e.g., for competitive research or pricing information. You could get it to transcribe all of your meetings and generate summaries and to-do lists. The options are endless.
Microsoft Power Automate
For Microsoft users, this tool is part of the Microsoft 365 suite and allows users to create automated workflows between Microsoft applications and various third-party services. It’s particularly useful for businesses already using Microsoft products and it can help automate tasks such as data collection, file synchronisation, and notifications.
HubSpot
Primarily known as a marketing, sales, and service software, HubSpot offers powerful automation features within its CRM platform. Businesses can automate email campaigns,
sales pipeline actions, and customer service processes, making it easier to maintain consistent communication with prospects and customers.
Salesforce
As one of the leading CRM solutions, Salesforce provides extensive automation capabilities across sales, customer service, marketing, and more. Its automation tools, such as Process Builder and Flow, enable businesses to automate complex business processes without writing code.
QuickBooks
Widely used for accounting purposes, QuickBooks allows small to medium-sized businesses to automate various financial processes, including invoicing, billing, payments, and payroll. This reduces manual data entry and helps businesses manage their finances more efficiently.
Asana
Asana is a project management tool that enables teams to collaborate more effectively. It allows for the automation of routine tasks within projects, such as assigning tasks to team members based on project phases or triggering reminders for deadlines, helping teams stay on track and focused on their work.
Slack
Although primarily a communication platform, Slack offers automation features through its integrations and bots. These can automate notifications for new tasks, issue alerts from other apps, or even facilitate simple tasks directly within Slack, enhancing team communication and productivity.
Demystifying automations: how do they actually work?
Automation involves using technology to perform tasks with minimal human intervention. This can range from simple, single-step tasks (like sending an automated reply to an email) to complex, multi-step workflows (such as processing and fulfilling an order from start to finish).
Let’s break it down into more understandable parts to explain how automations work:
1. Triggers and actions
Most automations work on a basic principle of triggers and actions. A trigger is the event that starts an automation. For example, you could make receiving an email your automation’s trigger. An action is what the automation does in response to the trigger. Sending an automated reply to the received email would be the action.
2. Conditions and logic
Some automations involve conditions or logic that determine when an action should occur or which action to take. Conditions are specific criteria that must be met for an action to happen. For example, an automation in a CRM system might only send a follow-up email if a customer hasn’t responded within 3 days.
Logic involves more complex decision-making in an automation, such as if-then statements. For example, if a customer clicks on a link in an email, then send them a follow-up email with more information; otherwise, send a different email encouraging them to check out the link.
3. Integration
Automations often involve integrating different software tools or platforms. This can be done through APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) or through automation platforms like Zapier that provide pre-built integrations. For instance, you might have an automation that integrates your email marketing tool with your CRM system to update customer profiles based on their interactions with your emails.
You may also choose to integrate an email marketing platform, accounting software, analytics tools, project management tools, and countless others.
4. Workflow automation
Some automations are part of larger workflows, involving multiple steps, conditions, and actions across different tools and platforms. Workflow automation is particularly useful in business processes, where tasks need to move from one stage or department to another with efficiency and consistency.
For example:
An online store receives a new order. Here’s a simplified automation workflow:
Trigger: A new order is placed on the website.
Action 1: The customer receives an automated order confirmation email.
Action 2: The order details are automatically sent to the inventory management system to deduct the purchased item from stock.
Condition: If the item’s stock falls below a certain threshold, then
Action 3: An automatic restock request is sent to your supplier.
This entire process minimises the need for manual input, reduces the chance of errors, and ensures that the customer and stock levels are managed efficiently.
The role of AI and machine learning
In more advanced automations, AI and machine learning can play a significant role. They can help in understanding natural language inputs, predicting outcomes based on data, personalising customer interactions, and even making decisions within predefined criteria.
Final thoughts
Automation is about making processes more efficient by allowing technology to handle routine, repetitive tasks. This allows humans to focus on more complex, creative, or strategic activities. Automations can range from simple to complex, but they all work to improve efficiency, accuracy, and consistency in various operations.
With a bit of creativity, small businesses can optimise a whole host of operations and focus on growth.