Beyond ChatGPT: A practical guide to help SMEs take full advantage of AI

Have you jumped onboard the AI revolution yet? Are you realising the benefits of automated processes, streamlined workloads and supercharged lead generation?

If the answer is no, maybe you think of AI as complicated and technical? Or perhaps it’s on your never-ending, never-shrinking, list of things to investigate.

Even if you have looked into it, there are so many solutions and platforms available that the research phase alone can quickly become overwhelming.

Or maybe you see AI as something that’s only for big corporate companies.

We get it. It can be overwhelming, especially when you’ve already got a million things to worry about. Budgets are tight and you want to get full return on any investment in time and money.

You want to be sure that any AI tools you implement make life easier, not harder, and that the costs of implementation and subscriptions not only pay for themselves, but ideally, make you money in the long term.

We don’t want SMEs to miss out on AI, because if you get it right, it really can be game-changing. That’s why we’ve put together this quick and practical guide based on our experiences of implementing AI for small and medium-sized businesses.

And if you need any help along the way, we take the stress out of AI by auditing your existing processes and identifying and embedding the tools that will truly boost your business.

Step 1 – Using AI to boost productivity

It’s easy to either get carried away looking at loads of shiny new tools that all sound amazing, or get bogged down in masses of choice.

We find that a more effective approach it is to start by identifying what your business is struggling with.

Where are your bottlenecks? What are the processes that are clunky, disjointed, repetitive, manual and sapping time? What could you be doing quicker and smarter?

Some of the common pain points we help SMEs fix with AI, include:

• Lead generation: Not enough time to keep the pipeline flowing?

You can automate this process using AI Agents  that move people naturally along your sales funnel whatever time of day the lead comes into your business.

• Customer service: Managing customer queries, answering emails, nurturing and retaining clients can all be incredibly time consuming. You can streamline this significantly using simple chatbots through to more sophisticated AI agents.
• Content creation: Marketing is often the first thing that slides when time or money are tight, yet can arguably have the biggest impact. There’s a whole AI eco-system to help you with this, from research to scoping and posting content. Read more in our blog on how to create authentic content with AI.
• Data analysis and reporting: These are key to business growth, but many SMEs only have time for the basics. It’s amazing what game-changing stuff you can learn in a matter of minutes through AI’s deep data analysis and the insights into your business it can deliver.

There are many more that might be on your list, such as client onboarding, client offloading, employee recruitment and onboarding, finances, HR. We’d encourage you to start by identifying your first top three most time consuming/frustrating tasks and begin your journey there.

You can read more about problems we help businesses solve with AI here.

Once you know where your bottlenecks are, you can start researching the best tools to use. Doing it this way round will help you narrow the search and ensure you’re genuinely solving problems, rather than over-complicating tasks.

You can even ask AI to provide you with an analysis of different tools based on what you need them to do, functionality, ease of use and price.

The beauty of AI is that you can start small, maybe identifying one or two use cases and relevant tools to help with a handful of jobs. You don’t need to go straight into a company-wide AI overhaul – in fact, that is the very last thing you should do!

It can help to start with something that feels manageable and valuable. So instead of building a customised knowledge chatbot, you could begin by using Claude or Gemini to generate 10 variations of a Facebook ad copy for an upcoming campaign.

This is immediate, low cost – Claude costs around £20 per month for the lowest tier subscription – and the results are measurable.

This can be an effective way to get the ball rolling, to overcome any fears or concerns about complexity, and to help you build knowledge and confidence.

Once you’ve got to grips with a couple of AI tools and what they can do, you’ll be amazed at how genuinely game-changing it can be in saving you time and money, plugging gaps, making everything slicker, and allowing you to focus more on scale and growth.

At this point, you might want to move to an embedded system that seamlessly integrates across your business.

This is where it gets trickier, with some key considerations:

• Who will manage this and scope what you need? Do you have someone in-house who has the time and skills to be your AI champion? This scoping is the crucial part.
• Do you buy off-the-shelf, or get systems customised for you?
• Should you get a partner in to help make these decisions and oversee the implementation? Don’t forget there will be legal and compliance to consider as well.
• AI tools are only as good as the data you feed them. This might become a stumbling block if your data is fragmented. Is your customer data in one place? Is your product data standardised? Do you have a clear owner for data quality?

Like with everything you invest in, whether that’s marketing strategy, a new CRM, or AI tools, you’ll want to be able to prove it isn’t just a shiny tool.

The SMEs which implement AI successfully have clear project goals and are able to measure them. AI isn’t set and forget either. You need to monitor and iterate as you track what’s working and fine-tune your prompts or AI models.

AI is all about balance. It’s about enhancing what you do, not replacing people. You shouldn’t  stop writing your expert blog posts and creating original content, for example, but you could use AI to repurpose your content into social media posts or infographics. It’s about using AI to enable you to do better and do more, rather than cutting back.

Helping you get started with AI in your business

If AI feels like a minefield, but you’re ready to explore what it can offer, we can help. Our AI experts work with you to spot opportunities, get your business and its data ready for AI, and identify and integrate the best tools across your operation.

This will save you hours of research and implementation time, and ensure that everything is set up securely, efficiently, and to maximum benefit for your business.

Ready to start on your AI journey?

Contact us today, to take your first steps.

A real example of AI in practice

Here’s a real-life example of how AI can be implemented to boost your business. We created a basic, but customised, AI assistant from scratch in around an hour.

Its aim is to help small marketing teams to start analysing the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of their business by acting as a Chief Marketing Officer.

Get your free SWOT analysis here.

As well as providing genuinely useful assistance for our potential clients, it also acts as a lead generating tool by encouraging people to contact us if they’d like help implementing any of the suggested strategies.