A practical guide to AI for small businesses

AI for small businesses. The AI hype is loud — but you don’t need to shout

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been on a steady march from the realms of science fiction all the way to your Outlook mailbox, your Instagram profile, your fridge (honestly, it feels like everything has an AI button all of a sudden). While it often feels like AI has only just burst onto the scene, in reality it’s the result of decades of academic research, computing advancements and vast data availability. The modern explosion of AI tools for small businesses is the latest iteration in a much longer story.

For small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), AI has gone from distant curiosity to practical utility, but with that utility comes confusion. Should you care? Should you be worried? And is it really worth it? This guide aims to demystify the current AI landscape, identify key players, and show you where it genuinely makes a difference for businesses like yours.

A brief history of modern AI

Though the roots of AI trace back to mid-20th century mathematics and computing, it’s the last two decades that have been truly transformational. In the 2010s, machine learning surged ahead thanks to advances in graphics processing unit (GPU) computing and the availability of massive data sets. Google’s DeepMind stunned the tech world in 2016 with AlphaGo, an AI that beat a human world champion at the complex board game Go — a feat once thought decades away.

That kicked off the current race. Companies like OpenAI (creator of ChatGPT), Google (with Bard and DeepMind), Microsoft (Copilot, and heavily invested in OpenAI), and Amazon (baking AI into AWS and Alexa) have all poured resources into what we now call generative AI. These are systems that not only analyse data, but create new content — text, images, music, and code — with sometimes eery speed and sophistication.

ChatGPT’s release in late 2022 marked a turning point. For the first time, everyday users could access and benefit from a powerful AI model, and the business world took note. What started as a curiosity became a tool — and increasingly, an expectation.

So who are the big players in AI right now?

• OpenAI – Backed by Microsoft, known for ChatGPT and GPT-4. Used in Bing, Microsoft Copilot, and countless third-party tools.
• Google DeepMind / Google Cloud – Bard and Gemini are Google’s conversational AI offerings. DeepMind also powers healthcare, science, and logistics advancements.
• Microsoft – Integrating AI throughout its 365 suite via Copilot. Also building developer tools with GitHub Copilot.
• Anthropic – A quieter rival to OpenAI, founded by ex-OpenAI researchers. Known for Claude, an increasingly popular LLM.
• Meta – Developing open-source AI models and integrating AI into Instagram, WhatsApp, and Facebook.
• Amazon – Bringing AI to AWS and Alexa, with Bedrock and Titan models for business use.

These guys aren’t just making chatbots. They’re building tools that analyse customer behaviour, automate routine tasks, write code, generate imagery, answer service queries, and streamline everything from hiring to helpdesks. The pace of innovation is blistering; in the past 12 months alone:

• ChatGPT plugins and custom GPTs now allow for tailored AI assistants.
• Google and Microsoft launched AI-enhanced office suites that summarise meetings, draft emails, and manage schedules.
• Image generation models (like DALL·E, Midjourney, and Stable Diffusion) hit new heights of photorealism.
• AI is now helping generate videos, music, and even 3D environments — something that was bleeding-edge R&D just two years ago.

The barrier to entry has also dropped. What once required data scientists and engineers can now be done with a few clicks. This is why AI is now your problem to think about — not just Big Tech’s.

What can AI do for a small business?

The phrase “use AI” is about as vague and meaningless as “use electricity.” The key to it is matching capabilities to business pain-points. Consider the following examples of how small businesses might use AI:

Smarter customer support

Imagine a small ecommerce retailer implementing a ChatGPT-integrated live chat to handle common questions like shipping times and return policies. With AI handling first-line queries, human agents step in only when needed. The result could, potentially, be faster response times and a lighter support workload.

Automated proposals and reports

Take a two-person consultancy. Instead of writing project proposals and reports from scratch, they prompt Microsoft Copilot to generate drafts. The saved time could be spent on billable work rather than formatting Word documents.

Content creation without an agency

A local café might use AI to create a weekly content calendar, draft blogs, write social captions, and generate basic graphics via Canva’s AI tools. Even without outsourcing, their online presence becomes more consistent and professional — all done in-house and with little skill required.

These examples are rooted in the types of gains real SMBs are already reporting.

What about the ethics?

AI isn’t all sunshine and rainbows. Training large models like GPT-4 consumes immense computational power, resulting in huge energy demands and water usage. Ethical questions also swirl around data privacy, misinformation, job displacement and algorithmic bias.

For many small business owners, these concerns might create a sense of unease. There’s the fear of becoming too reliant on “black box” technology that you don’t fully understand. There’s anxiety about feeding sensitive business data into systems you don’t control. And there’s scepticism about the broader impact: are you contributing to job loss? Environmental degradation? Will your customers trust content written by a bot? These are all valid concerns. If your business wants to be responsible:

• Use AI providers with clear sustainability goals
• Don’t upload client data (or at least identifiable data) into open AI tools
• Review outputs — don’t blindly trust them
• Keep a qualified human in the loop for all final decisions
• Be transparent with your team and customers when AI is used

AI can support accessibility, streamline workloads, and give smaller players a fighting chance, but only if it’s used thoughtfully. AI isn’t going away — Pandora’s box is well and truly open. Used well, it gives SMBs the power to scale up without scaling cost. But it’s also easy to get overwhelmed or lost in the noise. That’s where we come in.

At Plan IT Support, we help you:

• Choose the right tools
• Set them up securely
• Train your team to use them responsibly

So if you’re ready to see how AI can lighten the load without blowing the budget, give us a ring. We’ll help you cut through the hype and make AI work for your business.