Over the years, numerous small businesses have tried to establish a place for themselves in their respective niches. Unfortunately, however, a significant amount has been forced to halt their operations.
This is evident from data collected from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showing that 20% of small businesses fail during the first year of operations whereas 50% fail after operating for just five years.
One of the most significant reasons for this is the lack of access to resources such as capital, distribution networks, and last but not least, marketing budgets that competing giants within the same industry possess.
However, the large range of advanced technologies now available provides small businesses with a golden opportunity to make a solid mark, and one of the most promising ones among such technologies is generative artificial intelligence (generative AI).
Supported by the widespread availability of reliable and high-speed internet near you, this groundbreaking technology can help you improve and add efficiency to integral functions across your small business, giving you a chance to level the playing field when facing larger competitors.
This article will explore what generative AI is, the key improvements the technology can provide, and the benefits those improvements translate to for your small business.
What is Generative AI?
Generative AI is one of the most groundbreaking subsets of artificial intelligence. As the name suggests, this cutting-edge technology holds the power to generate content such as high-quality text, images, videos, code, and more based on the data used to train it and the user prompt provided.
To top that, generative AI models use deep learning to learn from the large amounts of existing data to create something new, personalized, and original and constantly improve their results. There are many generative AI models, that you may be familiar with, some notable examples include:
- ChatGPT: This tool took the world by storm when it launched in 2022, becoming the face of generative AI. The tool is a large language model that analyzes large amounts of data to provide humanlike responses to user prompts.
- Google Gemini: A solid alternative to ChatGPT, this tool uses natural language processing to answer user queries, summarize text, and generate content such as images. It can also rewrite speech, and analyze images and videos provided.
- Adobe Firefly: This is one of the greatest tools that can help in generating visually appealing and communicative designs. The tool can generate images based on the prompt provided, use text prompts and accompanying images provided to create videos, as well as translate audio and video.
Now that you have a clear understanding of generative AI, let’s explore what it brings to the table to improve function across your small business.
Core Applications of Generative AI for Your Small Business
The power of generative AI can be applied to numerous business functions, providing more streamlined and efficient solutions to previously time and labor-intensive tasks. Below are some core business functions where using generative AI can save the day!
- Customer Service
Customer service is the face of your small business, which makes it all the more essential to invest in refining this process. Applying generative AI to this business function can assist your small business in:
- Automatically responding to reviews which can allow customer service agents to focus on more pressing issues.
- Analyzing and addressing customer sentiments for a better understanding of what customers may feel or be looking for.
- Summarizing customer and agent interactions after a session to provide insights to agents that may help them refine their strategies as they move forward.
- Generating personalized training guides to refine and equip customer service agents based on their individual preferences, needs, and skill levels.
- Enabling chatbots or virtual assistants to understand the context when communicating allows for a more humanlike interaction between chatbots or virtual assistants and customers.
- Marketing and Sales
With unmatched potential for relevant, personalized, and effective content creation, generative AI can help your small business quickly generate a diverse range of marketing and sales collateral. Some examples include the following:
- Generating blogs, social media posts, product page descriptions, sales guides, and other marketing material while adhering to the company guidelines.
- Personalizing cross-platform marketing efforts such as social media ads, website content, SEO efforts, Google ads, and email marketing campaigns.
- Analyzing data and trends and providing remedial insights to help businesses conduct quick market research or refine their marketing strategies or messaging such as market segmentation, advertising campaigns and platforms, or product and feature development.
- Project Management
Sound project management is the backbone that connects and keeps all of your small business’s functions running together seamlessly. Generative AI can help project managers further streamline and improve this process, evident with applications such as:
- The analytical power of generative can generate documents such as meeting agendas, project scopes, task lists, or client-side reports automatically using the project guidelines and historical data.
- Generative can greatly help project managers allocate resources more relevantly and effectively by analyzing data and devising a RACI (responsible, accountable, consulted, informed) matrix.
- Data-based post-project analysis by generative AI can provide insights that help project managers reflect and refine their strategies for upcoming projects.
All these applications of generative AI across the business functions mentioned translate to a range of benefits for your small business. Let’s explore the most significant ones.
Benefits of Generative AI for Small Businesses
By applying generative AI across your business, you can enjoy a range of benefits that can help your small business scale. Most notably these include:
- Improved Customer Experience: Delivering personalized and timely customer interactions can help your small business establish significant goodwill among customers.
- Efficient Data-Backed Decision-Making: By analyzing data, generative AI can provide data-based insights to help key employees across all functions make more informed decisions.
- Significant Cost Efficiency: by automating repetitive tasks, the technology eliminates the need for hiring workers to conduct those tasks, helping your small business save a considerable amount.
- Enhanced Efficiency and Productivity: Automating routine tasks can help employees focus on more important strategic initiatives. Additionally, the power of this technology to quickly generate relevant and effective content can enhance productivity.
Embracing Generative AI – Equipping your Small Business for the Future
The vast range of cross-functional benefits that generative AI provides to small businesses can help them overcome the effects of significant growth barriers such as receiving loans or keeping up with the heavy marketing investments that their larger competitors make.
Embracing this groundbreaking technology now can create a fair competitive landscape for small businesses across multiple industries, one where the lack of resources is not the sole determinant of success.
