10 Must-Have AI Tools for Startups & Small Businesses

Artificial intelligence, or AI, is a disruptive force that can change conventional perceptions regarding innovation. You are more likely to find AI among the top technology trends in the world. The applications of the best AI tools for business, especially the new ones, serve as the ideal evidence for the functionalities of AI.

One of the common highlights in discussions about AI is the assumption that AI is the future. The assumption undermines the broad range of AI applications that serve distinct value benefits for different industries. You can come across multiple AI tools in the world that could write articles for businesses, answer the common queries of customers, and generate audio or video files.

The most important reason to consider the use of top AI tools for business is the assurance of faster completion of tasks. Small business owners have to face multiple challenges, starting from procuring the initial capital to finding skilled employees. However, a small business or startup is more likely to have a smaller workforce, which means that they cannot delegate tasks to other employees.

As a result, small businesses and startups might experience obstacles to ensuring the efficient growth of your business. Interestingly, you can find the ideal solution for growing your small business or startup at scale with AI. Let us find out the top AI tools which can help your business.

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Why Do Small Businesses or Startups Need AI Tools?

Before you review a list of AI tools for startups and small businesses, it is important to know their significance. What is the reason to choose AI tools for businesses? Shouldn’t you be worried about AI tools replacing people from important jobs? As a matter of fact, AI could serve as a valuable companion for a business in its early stages of development. It can work as a complementary force or support for your existing workforce.

The good thing about AI tools for small businesses and startups is that they reduce the need for building a large workforce. As an owner of a small business or startup, you can manage multiple tasks for your business. Furthermore, delegation of certain tasks to AI tools could also ensure freedom for your existing workforce. The use cases of free AI tools for business could ensure that your employees could focus on the important priorities for business growth. Here is an outline of the noticeable benefits of using AI tools for small businesses and startups.

The common advantage you can identify with every addition to the artificial intelligence tools list is cost reduction. Artificial intelligence could help lower the operational costs for businesses through automation of manual tasks and streamlining different operations.

• Better Efficiency and Productivity

The next reason to use AI tools for small businesses and startups is the assurance of improving employee productivity and efficiency. AI could help in the automation of manual tasks, which saves time for employees and also reduces the scope for errors. 

The improvements in efficiency and productivity through the use of AI tools translate into improvements in profitability for small businesses.  On top of it, the cost reduction advantages also help in improving the profitability of the use cases of AI for startups and small businesses. 

• Personalization in Customer Services 

Another prominent reason to find answers to ‘What are the best AI tools for small businesses and startups?’ points to personalization of customer services. Advanced chatbots and AI tools could help startups and small businesses ensure personalization of customer experiences. As a result, AI tools could serve as a valuable asset for ensuring customer retention and improving sales.

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What are the Top AI Tools for Small Businesses and Startups?

The advantages of AI tools for small businesses and startups showcase how AI could help businesses grow from scratch. Without the massive sales figures like big corporations, small businesses, and startups have to pay attention to multiple factors to improve their performance. The best AI tools for business functions can not only improve productivity and efficiency but also provide many other advantages. For example, AI tools could ensure cost reduction, which plays a crucial role in improving the profits of a business. Here is an outline of the must-have AI tools recommended for startups and small businesses.

Zoho Zia is an AI-powered assistant for sales teams in small businesses and startups. It is one of the top AI tools for business functions in the sales department. Zia helps sales team of your business collect customer data, automate manual lead management, improve sales numbers, and write documents. The AI-powered assistant also supports seamless integration into the company website, emails, and social media profiles. Flexible integration helps in responding to customer queries and providing the required support.

Another prominent highlight of Zoho Zia points to the features for helping startups and small business owners manage calendars and other functionalities. It is one of the promising choices in an artificial intelligence tools list for small businesses and startups, as you could use it for creating accurate customer behavior or personality profiles.

In addition, the AI-powered assistant for sales teams also helps in scheduling appointments and generating business performance reports. However, Zoho Zia presents some limitations, such as frequent issues and glitches. Furthermore, the user interface also presents difficulties for navigation alongside other issues.

The second edition among the AI tools recommended for startups and small businesses is DALL-E 2. It is a popular answer to “What are the best AI tools for businesses?” with some interesting functionalities for image generation. DALL-E 2 has been created by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. The AI tool helps in generating realistic art and images from natural language prompts and simple text descriptions. In addition, the AI tool can also help in combining different attributes, concepts, and styles as specified in the descriptions.

DALL-E 2 could serve as a valuable resource for small businesses and startups, particularly in the domain of art creation and fashion design. It also offers promising results in CGI creation and creative inspiration for developing new marketing content. DALL-E 2 also ensures that you save money, resources, and time in the process of generating content for your startups or small businesses. It provides promising advantages of accessibility, speed, iterative workflow, and customization for an AI-powered image generator in the market.

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Small business owners can also rely on AI tools like Motion to define the right schedule for daily tasks. Motion is one of the simplest AI tools for startups, which helps in automation of scheduling. Apart from the task of daily planning, it also generates accurate to-do lists with AI and machine learning algorithms. The AI tool helps in automatic planning for the day by considering different factors such as working hours, average task duration, meetings, and deadlines.

One of the most interesting highlights about Motion is that it could schedule meetings without any conflicts with your other responsibilities. Motion can serve as an excellent addition to the collection of AI tools for your business with its capability to improve productivity and save you time. 

The list of artificial intelligence tools for small businesses and startups also includes Otter AI, a meeting assistant. Otter AI can help in recording conversations, transcribing user interviews, and creating audio recordings. It is one of the free AI tools for business with promising value advantages for meetings. Otter AI could help in creating notes and generating summaries within seconds, thereby ensuring that you can make the most of your professional meetings.

Otter AI offers the flexibility for integration with Google and Microsoft Calendar to ensure automated recording of meetings on Microsoft Teams, Zoom, and Google Meet. The AI tool could also generate meeting summaries in real time, thereby helping users stay updated with all events in the meetings.

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Lumen5 is another promising choice among AI tools for small businesses and startups. The AI-powered video creation and editing tool is a trusted choice for streamlining video content creation. Business owners, as well as marketing professionals, could use Lumen5 as one of the best AI tools for business video creation. The AI feature in Lumen5 helps in repurposing marketing content. How? You can use Lumen5 for converting blog posts into immersive video experiences.

The most important highlight of Lumen5 is the in-built library with more than 500 million images, high-quality videos, and templates for video creation. It is an exclusive tool for business owners who believe that video creation is a complex and difficult process.

AI-powered video creation tools are powerful assets for small businesses and startups. However, it is also important to note that voiceovers help in improving the quality of engagement and results with business videos. Murf is one of the top AI tools for business video creation, with the facility of creating realistic voiceovers.

The text-to-speech feature of Murf, alongside voice cloning feature, ensures that it can convey human emotions effectively in words. Small business and startup owners can use the tool for adding professional voiceovers to video ads, marketing videos, and explainer videos.

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Remote work is one of the common highlights in the operating models of small businesses and startups worldwide. While it has opened up new possibilities for transforming the work environment, remote work has also created many challenges. Timely is one of the recommended AI tools for startups focused on time management.

It could help in tracking how your workforce spends time online with the help of integration with apps such as Microsoft Teams, Slack, Gmail, and others. Interestingly, Grant Thornton is one of the popular examples of big corporations using Timely to improve their efficiency.

Content marketing qualifies as one of the pressing concerns for small businesses and startups. The search for free AI tools for business content creation could lead you to alternatives like Neural Text. It is a trusted choice for automation of the content research process, including competitor research and keyword discovery.

Neural Text could help you create video scripts, social media ads, blog posts, and product descriptions within seconds. In addition, Neural Text also supports integration with websites based on Shopify or WordPress for automatic content review to make smarter decisions about content development.

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Small businesses could also search through an artificial intelligence tools list to find alternatives like Iterable. Most of the studies and surveys in the existing business environment point toward the growing need for personalization. Iterable uses extensive data analysis to help business owners in providing personalized messages to customers.

It also helps in seamless delivery of personalized messages through different communication channels. The primary goal of Iterable revolves around strengthening the connection between brands and customers.

Have you scrolled through your Instagram, Facebook, or YouTube feeds? You must have noticed the short videos that are attracting the attention of younger audiences and millennials. As a matter of fact, short videos are the key to popularity for users as well as businesses on the internet. Dumme serves as one of the ideal AI tools for startups that want to create short videos.

Users can upload a video or audio file (podcasts) to Dumme, which would find the important highlights for creating short videos. Subsequently, Dumme also generates a short video with titles, captions, and descriptions. You can notice how AI-powered tools like Dumme can simplify video creation tasks for your small business or startup.

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Bottom Line

Questions like “What are the best AI tools?” provide a generalized query about the effectiveness of AI tools. You need to look for artificial intelligence tools that could work for small businesses and startups. Therefore, you are most likely to search for free tools or the ones that could handle crucial business functions.

For example, the best AI tools for business video creation could help save money, resources, and time. However, it is also important to note whether the AI-powered tool can align with your desired requirements. If a specific AI tool could generate text, then you should check how it can help you achieve your business objectives. Learn more about some other AI tools for small businesses and startups in detail.