How Small and Medium Businesses Can Use AI to Thrive in 2025
In today’s competitive environment, small and medium sized businesses have access to a powerful and increasingly accessible asset: artificial intelligence, commonly referred to as AI. While many business owners still view AI as a tool for large technology companies or firms with significant budgets, it is becoming increasingly clear that AI can be just as transformative, if not more so, for smaller operations.
Rethinking AI: A Tool for Smaller Teams
Smaller businesses, including those operated by sole traders or small teams, are often in the best position to benefit from adopting AI. These businesses typically face time constraints and limited resources, and AI has the potential to relieve both by serving as a virtual support team.
Modern AI tools are built for ease of use, often requiring no technical knowledge. Many of them allow users to interact using everyday language, meaning that you do not need programming skills or a technical background to begin using them effectively. As one expert put it, “We can now interact with just normal human words and we can build stuff.”
Where to Begin: The Big Four
For business owners ready to explore AI, large language models, often abbreviated as LLMs, are a practical entry point. These tools are designed to perform a wide variety of general tasks and can help with communication, research, analysis and planning. The most commonly used tools include:
ChatGPT by OpenAI; known for its general versatility and ease of use.
Claude by Anthropic; particularly well suited for producing high quality written content that reads naturally.
Gemini by Google; integrated with Google services and designed to support a range of business tasks.
Microsoft Copilot; closely linked with Microsoft’s Office tools, offering seamless assistance with documents, spreadsheets and presentations.
These tools are a strong foundation for any small business owner looking to build familiarity with AI before exploring more specialised options that may be tailored to their sector.
Introducing AI Strategically
Rather than applying AI to every aspect of the business at once, it is more effective to take a strategic, targeted approach. This ensures that the technology is introduced in areas where it can provide the most benefit.
1. Define Goals and Identify Challenges
Start by reviewing the current structure of your business and pinpointing where AI could help. Are you losing valuable time responding to repeated customer queries? Do you find administrative duties take you away from more valuable work? Is content creation for your website or social channels consistently being delayed?
By identifying what you want to achieve, and the bottlenecks that are holding your business back, you can apply AI tools in a way that delivers measurable results.
2. Focus on Repetitive and Time-Consuming Work
Tasks that are repeated regularly are particularly well suited to automation. These include any process that follows a consistent pattern or routine. If there is something you find yourself doing every day or every week, it is likely that AI could take over, saving you both time and energy.
This might include sending follow up emails, generating standardised content, organising files, or even scheduling appointments. As one expert notes, “If you're doing something every morning and you're doing something on repeat, it's a great case for automation. It's also a great case for AI.”
3. Communicate Effectively with AI Tools
To get the best results from AI, it helps to frame your instructions with a focus on character, context and clarity.
Character: Treat the AI tool as if it were a human colleague. Define its role clearly. For example, you might say, “Act as a professional email copywriter with 10 years of experience in the plumbing industry.” This guides the tone and output style.
Context: Be sure to include relevant background information. Just as a human assistant would need context to complete a task effectively, AI works best when it understands the situation.
Clarity: Use clear and specific instructions. Where possible, format your inputs using short paragraphs, bullet points or labelled sections. Avoid vague or overly general commands, as these often produce weaker results.
Practical Ways to Use AI in Your Business
There are a number of practical applications that small and medium sized businesses can benefit from, even if they are only just starting to explore AI tools.
Customer Service: AI powered chatbots can handle a wide range of basic tasks, such as answering common questions, collecting client details or scheduling appointments. These tools provide round the clock support to customers, even outside of business hours, without requiring additional staffing.
Content Creation: Writing regular blog posts, email campaigns and social media content can be time intensive. AI tools such as Claude excel at generating human sounding text that aligns with your brand tone, helping you stay consistent across platforms.
Business Strategy and Planning: AI can be used to research competitor activity, monitor market trends, and produce planning documents. Whether it is drafting a proposal or compiling sector insights, these tools save time and support better decision making.
Administrative Tasks: Processing invoices, scheduling meetings, managing inboxes and organising files are all tasks that AI can assist with. These daily activities often take up hours each week, but automation frees up this time for more strategic work.
Sales Support: AI can help by generating personalised follow up emails, producing sample sales scripts, or analysing customer data to suggest upselling or cross selling opportunities based on recent behaviour or preferences.
What to Keep in Mind When Implementing AI
While AI offers many advantages, there are also important considerations when using it in a business context.
Data Security: Free versions of AI tools do not always guarantee data privacy. If you are using AI for sensitive or confidential information, consider a paid plan or enterprise version that offers enhanced privacy settings and commercial protections.
Accuracy and Oversight: AI can produce content quickly, but the accuracy of the information it provides should not be assumed. All AI generated materials should be reviewed and fact checked before they are published or shared.
Keeping Pace with Change: The field of AI is developing rapidly. New features, models and tools are released regularly. It is important to set aside time to stay informed about updates so that your business continues to benefit from the latest advancements.
For small and medium sized businesses working with limited resources, AI has the potential to greatly enhance output without increasing costs. When used effectively, it helps business owners to shift focus from routine operations to areas that drive growth and long term value.
In the years ahead, success will not be determined by the size of your team or your technology budget. Instead, it will depend on your ability to adapt — and to use tools like AI in a way that supports your goals and improves how you serve your customers.
AI is not here to replace the human qualities that make your business unique. Instead, it is here to help you create space for those qualities to shine by removing unnecessary workload and freeing you to focus on what matters most.