9 Top AI tools for small businesses 

From client management to content creation: Essential AI tools to help your business thrive

Running your own small business can feel like juggling endless tasks with limited time and resources. You’re not at the place where you can bring on a big team, but you need help to keep up with all of the demand coming in from your clients and leads. 

Thankfully, there’s artificial intelligence—known as AI. With AI-powered tools, you’ll be able to automate repetitive tasks and streamline your workflows so that you’ll be able to work comfortably as a team of one. 

Here’s our rundown of the best AI tools for small businesses that directly tackle some of the most common challenges small businesses face, like client relationship management, marketing, and more.

1. HoneyBook 

Designed specifically for independent businesses, HoneyBook is an AI-powered client relationship management platform (CRM) that helps you transform your workflow and help you work smarter—not harder—so you can get time back, and focus on what really matters: your craft. 

Using HoneyBook is like having your own personal business partner. With the power of AI, you’ll be able to make client communications more efficient; stay on track with projects and client needs; receive alerts every time a high-value lead reaches out; and—most importantly—be able to identify data-driven insights, business opportunities, and trends, so you can be confident in your business decisions. 

Even better, AI is built directly into the platform—so HoneyBook feels like an actual member of the team—dedicated to helping you grow your business and achieve your goals.. 

Things that we love:

• Built specifically for small and independent business owners—unlike most AI tools.
• AI is integrated seamlessly into the platform

 Things to consider:

• Best for service-based businesses who are looking to establish strong relationships with clients

2. Blaze.AI

Creating marketing content like blogs, social media posts, newsletters, and websites is one of the biggest and most time consuming hurdles of running independent businesses today. The problem is, it’s critical to building a business in today’s internet-first world, and is no longer a nice to have, but a need to have for not just growth, but survival. 

Enter Blaze.AI, our favorite AI-powered content generation tool for creating personalized social media content, blog posts, newsletters, and websites. 

Using Blaze.AI is like having a team of content creators. With the tool, you’re able to help you create your brand voice and tone, brainstorm content types and ideas, and then make a month’s worth of content with a single click. 

And that’s not all, we love how you’re able to collaborate in real time with your team or clients so you can make sure that every piece of content is picture perfect. 

One of our favorite features on Blaze.AI is their Content Analytics panel. After you publish, you’ll be able to see how all of your content performs and be able to iterate and make changes quickly with future content. 

Things we love: 

• How extensive Blaze’s platform is. With it, you’re able to plan, create, review, optimize, content all in one tool. Using it is like having a marketing team member. 

Things to consider: 

• Blaze is great for broad, public-facing marketing materials like email marketing campaigns or a blog, and less great for one to one communication with a client. 

3. Midjourney

Almost immediately after AI text-generators came out, AI-powered image generators were close behind. And Midjourney is considered one of the best tools for the job. With simple prompts like you would use for ChatGPT or HoneyBook AI, Midjourney generates high-quality, artistic images that you can use for marketing materials 

Because many small business owners don’t have the resources to hire a professional designer or graphic artist, or the bandwidth to do it themselves—a tool like Midjourney provides small business owners an easy way for image creation that mimics different styles at scale. Input a description of what image you want and Midjourney generates multiple variations in a couple of minutes. It’s great for graphics that you need to spin up quickly for Instagram posts, Facebook Ads or Pinterest graphics.

You can also use it for your promotional materials—lead magnets or digital flyers take seconds to design. The best part is you don’t need a big budget since the tool is only $10 monthly.

While impressive, Midjourney doesn’t always produce an image that fits your prompt. It may take several attempts to get something that works. 

Things we love:

• You don’t need any design experience to create professional, high-quality images.
• Generates social media images quickly.
• Cost-effective solution 

Things to consider:

• You may need to prompt the tool several times before getting a workable image.
• AI-generated images aren’t as in-depth or personalized as images created by a professional designer. 

4. Zapier

Zapier is an automation tool that lets you connect the apps and software you use for your business. 

Zapier creates automated workflows called Zaps that don’t require coding or specialized knowledge. With Zapier, you’re able to automate tasks so you don’t have to jump constantly between platforms to get something done.

Let’s say a customer just scheduled a meeting through your online scheduler. Zapier lets you automatically trigger a follow-up email or add the customer to your CRM with just one Zap. This is even though the process requires multiple platforms to connect with each other.

The tool comes with pre-built workflows but for business owners who don’t have much AI workflow experience, it can be overwhelming or complicated to get started.

Things we love:

• Lets you connect multiple tools and platforms together even if they don’t have an existing connection.
• Doesn’t require any coding to set up.
• AI helps predict and recommend the best automation setups.

Things to consider:

• Without previous automation experience or technical expertise, setup can be difficult to understand and learn.

5. Notion AI

Before integrating AI, Notion started as a project management tool that lets you create tasks, projects, notes, and documents in a single platform. Following the lead of many other popular software tools, Notion integrated its own AI assistant to make planning and organization even easier for small business owners.

The built-in AI assistant called Sam takes organization further by letting you find answers across Notion, Slack and Google Drive. Ask Sam a question about the platform and it will scan the contents within to find an answer for you. No more digging through endless files or conversations.

You can also create and edit documents with ChatGPT-style prompts that you can edit at a later time. The tool also scans PDF documents or images and then provides suggestions on the next steps. It can also summarize information for you.

By using the power of an AI chatbot within Notion, you can create complicated projects and tasks in seconds. However, learning Notion AI can take time, especially if you want to customize it to your business.

Things we love:

• Combines project management, document creation and organization in a single platform.
• Integrates an AI assistant that pulls relevant information from Notion, Slack and Google Drive to save you time searching for documents or past conversations.
• Allows you to upload PDFs and images to get actionable suggestions.

Things to consider:

• The comprehensive features and customization options create a steep learning curve.

6. Rewind

Small business owners who don’t have the time to go back through the day’s meetings and notes will love using Rewind. The AI tool is one of the few reliable ways to track and recall practically everything you see, say or hear throughout your workday on your computer.

Running silently in the background, Rewind captures your screen activity and audio throughout every activity you perform. Then, it automatically compresses, transcribes and encrypts the data on your local server so that you only have access to the information.

Even if your browser crashes or you forget to save something, Rewind is your reliable assistant who always has your back. Solopreneurs are guilty of managing multiple tasks at the same time and switching between roles within the company. But Rewind helps manage your day-to-day operations.

Once it records your day, it can summarize meeting notes, draft emails or review your past conversations for you. The tool even integrates with ChatGPT so you can input simple prompts to find the information you need. The only issue is finding memory space for all the storage it requires.

Things we love:

• Automatically records and transcribes everything you do on a computer so you never have to take notes or remember where you left off.
• Retrieves past conversations, documents and browser activity to prevent lost information from browser crashes.
• Integrates ChatGPT to automatically draft emails, generate summaries and provide responses based on recorded conversations.

Things to consider:

• Stores all the data locally, so you’ll need a lot of memory space to handle the heavy load.

7. Vimcal

Made specifically for small business owners who handle remote contractors or vendors, Vimcal is the ultimate organizational calendar. Instead of managing multiple time zones to coordinate a meeting, Vimcal ensures you book at the most convenient time without manually figuring it out yourself.

The tool will save you valuable time from juggling multiple clients, teams and collaboration with booking links everyone can easily access. People can pick from pre-selected time slots, or you can put up a poll that asks people what time works best for their schedule.

The color-coded calendars make it easy to track different types of meetings and commitments and the entire system is customizable. The Do Not Disturb mode includes a Pomodoro timer with ambient sounds to help you stay focused between calls or meetings.

Independent owners that are locally based won’t have such a big need since coordination will be relatively easy. But when you start to scale to other locations or manage vendors remotely, you’ll need a business tool with advanced features like Vimcal.

Things we love:

• Automatically suggest best meeting times based on participants’ availability, time zone and working hours.
• Provides booking links, color-coded calendars and polls for effortless scheduling.
• Includes a Do Not Disturb mode with a Pomodoro timer and ambient sounds.

Things to consider:

• Local-based businesses won’t benefit since coordination will be easier to manage.

8. Buffer

One of the more helpful social media tools available, Buffer is an AI-powered tool that lets you schedule, optimize and repurpose your content across any platform. Instead of manually setting up posts yourself on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok, Buffer lets you control everything from one dashboard.

Most social media platforms already allow post scheduling. But Buffer takes it a step further by letting you refine your drafts and tailor content for different platforms with one AI prompt. You’re not just scheduling content but repurposing it with the intention to match the tone and format of each platform.

For example, create a LinkedIn post and ask Buffer to shorten it for X. Within seconds, you have a second post ready to go. The AI assistant can even suggest trending topics, post ideas or engagement strategies.

Instead of wracking your brain to come up with a month’s worth of high-quality content, let Buffer figure it out for you and follow its lead to get engaging content that resonates with your audience. The only downside is that some social media platforms may not work well since they want people to use their own platform instead of a third party.

Things we love:

• Lets you schedule and manage posts for multiple social media platforms from one dashboard.
• You can use AI assistants to refine posts and repurpose content for specific platforms.
• The AI assistant will generate new post ideas or some up with trending topics to help your content stay relevant.

Things to consider:

• Platform policies may restrict Buffer’s use for scheduling and organizing posts.

9. Grammarly

If you’re anything like most small business owners, you don’t always have time to catch every small grammatical error and punctuation mistake in your writing. Grammarly helps you improve your communication across all channels by catching your writing mishaps and suggesting better alternatives.

The secret best part about Grammarly is the browser extension you can download and use almost anywhere online. Writing an outreach email and need everything to sound perfect? Crafting a vendor email to help coordinate some changes? Grammarly works anywhere you’re writing online and checks your mistakes in real time. The tool then highlights any mistakes and automatically generates a better version.

Beyond fixing simple mistakes, the tool can also help improve tone, clarity and plagiarism to make sure you’re always providing original content.

Things we love:

• Instantly checks and improves writing in real time across email, social media, websites and more.
• Enhances your writing by providing AI-powered suggestions for grammar, sentence structure and readability.
• Helps curate specific tones and clarity adjustments to sound professional, friendly or persuasive.

Things to consider:

• Can become distracting when creating content since the tool automatically highlights any mistakes or suggestions.

The best AI tools for small businesses

AI tools are transforming how small businesses operate by helping them save time, automate repetitive tasks and streamline their workflows—all without needing extra resources to keep up. The right tools will take care of the complicated work while you and your team can focus on activities that help grow the business.