If you are going to do a business, the importance of AI tools cannot be denied. AI is not just a luxury, instead it’s a necessity specially for businesses aiming to growth with a fast pace and stay competitive. In this article, we’ll explore the most effective AI tools that can boost your business, whether you’re running a startup or managing a major enterprise.
Handling a business without leveraging AI tools can spell disaster, especially if you lack a skilled team to manage day-to-day tasks. If you’re fortunate enough to have a strong management team, your business is likely to thrive. Unfortunately, many businesses fail due to poor management, which struggles to oversee the entire process effectively. This challenge is even greater for those managing a business single-handedly.
To transform your business into a startup unicorn or a thriving enterprise, AI technology offers a critical lifeline. These tools are not just helpful—they’re essential. In this article, we’ll introduce you to some of the best AI tools available today. Whether you’re steering a startup or a major corporation, these AI tools will automate your processes and significantly boost your business’s productivity.
What are AI Tools?
Before using AI tools for business, it’s important to understand what an ‘AI tool’ is. To make a wooden table, you need raw materials like wood. But to turn wood into a table, you need instruments to cut and shape it. Similarly, in business, you might have a product or service, but to reach your audience, collaborate with business partners, or track competitors, you need specialized tools.
AI tools are programs, software applications, or websites that require little or no human interaction to perform certain tasks. These tools do not rely on human intelligence; instead, they perform tasks like decision-making, problem-solving, or even automated emailing on their own.
To understand this concept, consider a washing machine: people used to wash their clothes by hand, but now they use machines to do the washing for them. Similarly, AI tools can perform tasks that typically require human intelligence, such as planning, making decisions, and solving problems.
It is thought that AI tools will replace humans, but these tools are designed to work alongside them. The best AI tools for business can track the market, analyze the current scenario, send emails, pitch the service or product to the right audience, resolve customer queries, streamline the entire process, and much more. Humans can use these AI tools to achieve better and more productive outcomes.
AI Tools are required in a Business
For any business to grow the basic requirement is a 24/7 customer support, maintaining relationship with their customer, getting leads, email campaigns, customer follow-up, keeping the track of all the sales, inventories, and transactions. On the basis of these data further analysis is required to grow the business and manage workflow.
AI Tools are divided into seven sub categories:
| 1. | Customer Service & Support | Customer service and support tools powered by AI are generally virtual assistants (Chatbots) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools. |
| 2. | Marketing & Sales | Marketing of a product/service is done normally through digital process nowadays, in which social media plays a significant role. Apart from social media there is one more famous and proven technique of marketing i.e. email marketing and cold mailing. So, Social media automation, email marketing automation and sales automation falls under this category. |
| 3. | Business Intelligence & Analytics | As there is large amount of data to handle, old tools like spreadsheet alone isn’t sufficient to do analysis. Even without proper chart and graphs, human cannot identify the trends. Business Intelligence tools helps to process those large data and convert them into meaning visuals. Through which one can do further analysis required for the growth. |
| 4. | Workflow Automations | In a business, there are many repetitive task one needs to do in order to maintain the work flow of the business. And apart from this, one needs to use same content over different platforms for eg. you own a website and a mobile application for your business. So doing such kind of task there are Workflow Automations which are powered by AI. These tools include Robotic Process Automation, Process Automation and Project Management Tools. |
| 5. | Human Resource Automation | A business is totally dependent on their employees and workers. Even one single person handles the whole business, still without a human involvement a business cannot emerge. Managing Human Resource is a skill on which the whole future of the business depends. It better if a person handles it but there are various AI tools which do recruitment and HR processes like payroll & onboarding. These tools are HR Automation and Recruitment Automation. |
| 6. | Financial Management | In a business, transaction happens on a regular basis. To support in this process and enhance this process more smoothly there are AI tools like Expense Management and Accounting Software. |
| 7. | Document Management | When the whole business is running on virtual basis, signing documents digitally has become utmost important. There are AI tools for this also. |
List of some best AI Tools for Business
When you start searching for something, you now get a variety of options—this is the power of the internet. But picking the best option from a pool of resources is an art. We aren’t expert artists, but we strive to be. To help solve your problem and save your precious time, we’ve simplified your task by selecting some of the best AI tools for business.
In the heading above, you would have understood the necessary tools for a business. It’s important to understand that the basic requirements for every business, whether it’s a startup, small, medium, or large, are the same. The only difference is that as the size of the data increases, so does the need for more efficient AI tools.
Please Note: The AI tools listed below include both free and paid versions. Most of tools are paid and some of them are free to use. The tools which are free to use have some limitation and are suitable only for a business at small scale. We have marked free tools differently.
1. AI tools for Customer Service and Support
- Chatbots: Chatbots interact with people in a human-like way. Just as humans converse with each other, chatbots are designed to talk to customers and provide them with solutions. Some AI powered chatbots are Drift and Intercom. These AI powered tools handles customer’s queries and are available for 24/7.
Apart of these Rasa is one free platform which helps in building customizable AI powered chatbots.
- CRMs: CRMs are used to manage relationship with customers. All the records related to customers are kept. Some AI tools for CRM are Salesforce and Hubspot. Both are paid tools but Hubspot provides a free version of their CRM tool- Hubspot CRM.
2. Marketing & Sales Tools
- Email Marketing Automation: In a business pitching the product/service to the customer is most significant step. And pitching at right time to a potential customer can lead to a sale. For these reasons email marketing gets necessary, so your product/service reach directly to the customers. Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, and Brevo (Sendinblue previously) are some AI powered Email marketing tool. Out of which Mailchimp provides free service for 30 days.
- Sales Automation: Pipedrive and Zoho CRM are tools which use AI capabilities for customer follow-up and lead generation for a business. And if you’re looking for free software then Bitrix24 has free plans at basic level.
- Social Media Automation: Buffer, Hootsuite, and Sprout Social tools will help in scheduling the post and analyze them for better results. From the listed tools, Buffer offers some free plans.
- We have listed top 6 AI marketing Tools for Businesses. Click here to check them now.
3. Business Intelligence & Analytics Tools
- Business Intelligence (BI) Tools: It’s crucial to gain insights on how your business is performing and who are your target customers, what are their likes and dislikes. To analyze all the data related to customers, their preferences and to gain some insights from it we need some tools. One of the free open source tool is Metabase.
- Predictive Analysis Tools: Gaining insights from data is crucial, but what comes next? To maintain the flow of your business, you should use predictive analysis tools. These tools assist in decision-making based on the data. Orange is a renown data mining and predictive analysis tool which is completely free to use.
4. Workflow Automation Tools
- Process Automation: As the name suggests, process automation involves automating certain tasks. But what kind of tasks should we automate? We typically automate processes that are repetitive and require significant human effort. Examples of such tasks include data entry. One free to use tool for process automation is IFTTT.
- Robotic Process Automation (RPA): Some of the tools one can use for RPA are Microsoft Power Automate, Automation Anywhere Community Edition and UiPath Community Edition. No all of these are free tools but you can try for free and use the community version.
5. Human Resource Automation Tools
- Human Resources Automation: Whether you hire an Human Resource or not, still there are processes such as recruitment, employee database management and many such task which requires more repetition over logic. For this reason it’s good to use a tool. Some free tools for HR Automation are Bamboo HR and Zoho People. These are trusted tools used by many firms.
6. Financial Management Tools
- Accounting and Bookkeeping: Maintaining an account requires double entry process, which has a tendency of error. To prevent errors in maintaining the account and bookkeeping there are AI Tools. These Tools are Wave and GnuCash.
7. AI Tools for Managing Documents
- Mananging your documents and files there are few AI tools, these tools are absolutely free and manages most of your documents at a single place. These are SmallPDF, DocHub and OnlyOffice. In the listed tools, DocHub integrates with Google Drive and Dropbox.
Try out these tools and Automate your business. Using these tools enhance your productivity and handle your business more efficiently.