How Can a Small Business Use AI Tools?

When you run a small business, you have to wear a lot of hats. Suddenly, you’re not just an entrepreneur. You’re an accountant, an inventory manager, a chief marketing officer, and an entire human resources department. Delegating is key, but scaling and hiring talent could take years if you’re just starting out.

According to CNBC, small businesses are increasingly using AI to cover tasks they can’t afford to hire humans to do. For a new small business, this could mean saving tens of thousands per year while still keeping parts of their business going.

Below, CNBC Select rounded up some of the best AI-enhanced tools for small businesses. We considered functions like customer service, accounting and payroll, among others. Read more on our methodology below.

Who’s this for? Xero is an all-in-one accounting platform that offers payroll, bookkeeping, reporting, inventory management, HR tools and benefits administration (in partnership with Gusto) and more. It also offers an AI assistant called Just Ask Xero (JAX) that can help you automate accounting tasks and it’s formatted as a generative AI conversation bot (currently in beta mode). The format might feel familiar if you’ve ever used ChatGPT or another generative AI conversation platform, making Xero’s AI capabilities feel more approachable. JAX is also available on mobile devices, so you can take your AI accounting tools with you anywhere you go.

Standout benefits: Xero is one of the more affordable accounting options on the market. Pricing plans start at $20 per month. Their mid-tier plan costs $47 per month and their highest tier is $80 per month. Plus, if you sign up for any plan with Xero, you’ll get your first month for free.

Who’s this for? QuickBooks is one of the more popular brands in bookkeeping and accounting services for businesses. Intuit Assist is its AI-powered feature that lets you automatically create invoices, send personalized invoice reminders, get payment method recommendations to help you get paid fastest and automate administrative tasks. So lets say you want to create a client invoice but don’t have an invoice template of your own and don’t want to spend too much time creating one. With Intuit Assist, you can simply take a photo of an email where you discussed services and pricing with a client, or meeting notes and it’ll turn it into an invoice for you.

Standout benefits: QuickBooksoffers four pricing plans, each with a ton of features so you can really get the most bang for your buck. Even the most basic plan includes tax help, banking, reporting, cash flow management, bill management and mileage tracking, just to name a few. But if you go with a more advanced plan, you’ll get all this plus the ability to add up to 25 users to the account, 24/7 support, financial planning, record transactions in multiple currencies, inventory management and more. These higher priced plans also allow users to connect all of their sales channels to their QuickBooks account instead of only being limited to just one or two sales channels. All pricing tiers come with access to Intuit Assist, but the Essentials, Plus and Advanced tiers include another AI tool: Payments Agent, Customer Agent and Project Management Agent, respectively.

Who’s this for? Otter is an AI notetaking agent that helps professionals create transcripts from audio, generate summaries and create a list of action items. If you’re a business owner in the consulting space or run any other type of business where you’ll need to get on client or customer calls, you can use Otter to take notes during your meeting that you can refer back to any time. It integrates with Google Meet, Zoom, Dropbox, Notion and more to take your notes and keep track of your summaries. Otter’s service can best be broken down into four main agents: the Sales Agent, Media Agent, Recruiting Agent and Education Agent. Each agent is focused on streamlining a different part of your business/work.

Standout benefits: Otter offers a completely free plan with basic features. This plan lets you automatically generate summaries for an unlimited number of meetings but you can only receive a total of 300 monthly transcription minutes, which breaks down to 30 minutes per conversation. And you can only import and transcribe three audio or video files over the lifetime of your membership. Still, this can be an attractive package if you’re a solopreneur who’s just starting out. The most expensive Business Plan starts at $20 per month and automatically transcribes up to four hours per conversation for a total of 6,000 monthly transcription minutes. There is also a middle ground Pro Plan that starts at just $8.33 per month and an Enterprise Plan for larger companies but pricing is not publicly available for this plan; you’ll have to contact Otter to schedule a demo and get pricing for your organization.

Who’s this for? LegalZoom is known for being a business formation service that offers access to attorneys to help you get your legal questions answered throughout the process. However, they’re now offering an integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which will allow business owners to get personalized guidance through an AI agent. The integration technically lives on OpenAI’s platform but is backed by expertise from LegalZoom’s content.

Standout benefits: Aside from access to legal advice and business formation, LegalZoom offers features aimed at helping you keep your business running even after you’ve already taken the plunge and made an official registration. The platforms provides access to over 150 downloadable legal forms that you can customize for your business as well as website building tools. You can also sign up for a registered agent service, business compliance coverage, trademark registration and monitoring and more. LegalZoom can help you register an LLC, S-Corp or C-Corp, Nonprofit or DBA (Doing Business As).

Who’s this for? Gusto is a payroll service that’s gotten rave reviews over the years citing its easy-to-navigate platform, well-designed user interface and simplicity in its offerings. The platform lets business owners automate payroll but Gusto is also rolling out an AI assistant called Gus. Gus works as a chatbot, similar to other conversational AI agents, and is knowledgeable on compliance mandates for your state, reporting facts and figures relevant to your business and versatile enough to complete administrative tasks for you like approving PTO requests. It’s not just another generic AI-assisted chatbot that will pull general information about business management from around the web. It’s integrated into your business and can really help you peel back the layers to get answered to nuanced questions about your specific business and employees. Gus is currently available for early access.

Standout benefits: Gusto gives business owners access to unlimited payroll runs, state tax registration help, international contractor payments, time off requests and approvals, PTO reporting, cost reports, tax credits and more. Pricing starts at $49 per month plus $6 per person and the most expensive pricing plan is $180 per month plus $22 per person.

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To determine some of the best AI-based products for small businesses,CNBC Selectanalyzed over a dozen software companies and looked at their pricing, features, user reviews and ratings.

We’ve narrowed down our recommendations by:

• Best for accounting
• Best for invoicing
• Best for client calls
• Best for legal questions and business formation
• Best for payroll

The categories we considered represent some of the most salient needs of small business owners based on market and competitor research and social media listening techniques.

We sifted through online reviews for each platform to better understand the functionality when it comes to user experience, customer service, features, integrations the implementation of additional resources where applicable.

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