How AI is Transforming Business Operations
AI tools are no longer niche; they have become essential for businesses looking to stay competitive. By automating repetitive tasks, generating creative content, and providing valuable insights, AI can help businesses save time, reduce costs, and enhance creativity. You will find them incorporated in more applications, i.e. canva, schedulers, research tools. They can summarize text, generate text, and images! Whether you’re looking to boost content creation, streamline operations, or design captivating visuals, there’s an AI tool designed to meet your needs. Let’s explore some of the top AI tools that can help businesses succeed in today’s digital landscape.
Unlocking the Power of AI: The Best Tools for Different Business Tasks
| Task | Recommended AI Tool* | Description* |
| Content Creation | ChatGPT | Ideal for brainstorming, writing blog posts, e-books, marketing, and answering questions. It streamlines content creation for blogs, emails, and more. It can be a great tool for creating the text to describe a business concept, marketing strategy, or even writing product descriptions. |
| Content Creation | Anthropic Claude | Anthropic Claude can complete problem-solving tasks, like finding mathematical solutions, translating between languages, and summarizing long documents. |
| Content Creation | Gemini | Supercharge your creativity and productivity with Gemini. Chat to start writing, planning, learning and more with Google AI. Take advantage of a free ecourse on this!  g.co/grow/AIforSMBs |
| Content Creation | Microsoft Copilot | Integrated with Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Copilot can help with online searches to find information, compare products, and summarize web page content. |
| Social Media Optimization | Predis.ai | Generates hashtags and content ideas for social media |
| Video Creation | Lumen5 | Converts written content into videos, perfect for social media posts or marketing campaigns (tip from Kasia Johnson, Merge Forward.com) |
| Video Creation | Synthesia | Create video from your presentation, choose a presenter and a language. |
| Video Creation | Automate.video | Create a video from a presentation in the language of your choice; low cost for monthly subscription. |
| Logo Design | AI Logo Generator | Quickly generates professional logos for brand identity creation. |
| Graphic Design | DALL-E | An advanced AI tool for creating stunning, tailored images and graphics for marketing or creative needs. |
| Graphic | Canva AI Design | Create various marketing materials and graphics |
| Image | Dreamstudio.ai | Image generation tool |
| Image Generation | Adobe Photoshop | Describe an image for it to create |
| Professional Imaging | Headshotpro | Get professional quality, AI generated headshots |
| Graphic | Midjourney | Generate images from text prompts. |
| Social Media Management | Buffer | Helps manage and schedule social media posts, offering analytics and hashtag recommendations. |
| Video and Image Generation | Runway | Create realistic video content and editing existing videos. |
| SEO and Marketing Analysis | SEMRush | Provides keyword research, competitor analysis, and detailed SEO insights to optimize marketing strategies. (tip from Kasia Johnson, Merge Forward.com) |
| Marketing | Adcreative.ai | Generate multiple design options for your ads and social media post, ensuring variety and creativity. (tip from Kasia Johnson, Merge Forward.com) |
| Business Presentation Creation | SlidesAI | Turns text into polished presentations |
| Marketing/Content | Jasper | Jasper is a writing assistant intended for marketing tasks, like drafting social media posts, emails, and landing page content |
| Presentations | Gamma | Uses your text or word document to create a powerpoint or pdf |
| Brand & Design | Brandsnag.com | Ensure your brand name is available across all platforms with brandsnag, which checks for name availability and verifies your identity. (tip from Kasia Johnson, Merge Forward.com) |
| Brand Design and Identity | Looka | Helps businesses design their logos, select brand colors, and even create slogans. |
| Market Research | Perplexity.ai | A research tool that uses large language models to deliver accurate answers to questions |
| Voiceover and Transcription | Otter.ai | Transcribes spoken words for fast note-taking, useful for meetings or interviews/ |
| Voiceover | ElevenLabs | ElevenLabs is a speech AI tool that can generate spoken voice-over audio from text in different languages. |
| Notes | Julius.ai | Data analysis tool. Upload data of different types and “talk” to it using a conversational portal. Has fewer features than so of the enterprise business intelligence tools like Akkio but a more reasonable price point and ease of use. |
| Notes | Protobots.ai | AI assistants for Economic Development Organizations. The ProtoBots automations assist in various writing, research, and analysis task such as financial analysis, reporting, planning, and strategy formulation, and many more. |
| Custom GPT | Chatgpt.com/gpts | Upload information on your own resources |
| Website Creation | Durable | AI-driven website creation platform that builds functional websites in minutes |
| Scheduling | Buffer | All in one tool for social media management, Buffer uses AI to assist with scheduling, data tracking, and metrics analysis |
| Scheduling | Later | Streamlines content scheduling and provides hashtag recommendations, making it easier to manage your social media presence |
| Scheduling | Hootsuite | Streamlines content creation with AI to write text and links with canva to streamline images added to scheduled post |
| Scheduling/Workload | Clockwise | Clockwise is a calendar tool that learns users’ work habits to automatically schedule and manage calendar events. |
| Workload | Airtable.com | Transform existing spreadsheets into smart sheets that can automatically generate visualizations, dashboards, and more. AI tools in certain premium levels can validate data and improve workflows. |
| Workload | Grammerly | Grammar and spelling tool. The paid version has integrations that will use AI to analyze emails and autopopulate links to Google Drive, One Drive, Calendly, and task managers like Jira, Asana, Notion, and Trello. |
| Workload | Notion.so | Project management and create tool to organize task, notes, and designs. AI features to assist with automation of repeated tasks and summarization of notes. |
| Workload | Wordly.ai | Live AI transcriptions and translation. Great for those who conduct large training and need multi-language support or live captioning. If you are a nonprofit look for special pricing |
| Workload | NotebookLM | NotebookLM integrates into document apps, like Google Docs, and helps summarize or ask specific questions about text, notes, and sources |
| Workload/Automation | AI by Zapier | AI by Zapier is a built-in productivity tool that allows AI automation to be integrated with the apps and workflows already connected through Zapier. |
| Other | LNK.BIO | Simplify your social media presence with Lnk.bio, a platform that consolidates al your social media links into a single, easy to share URL. (tip from Kasia Johnson, Merge Forward.com) |
| Coding | Tabnine | Tabnine can be a plugin to many popular code editors to help speed up delivery and keep code safe. |
| Coding | Jupyter AI | Jupyter is an open-source platform for coding, and this built-in tool includes a chat interface, which can be used to generate code, fix coding errors, and ask questions about files. |
| Emotional AI Assistance | Pi | Provides emotionally intelligent conversation support, ideal for personal advice or customer service. |
Input is important for a good output.
Prompt engineering is the practice of developing effective prompts that elicit useful output from generative AI. Creating clear and specific prompts is one of the most important parts of prompt engineering. The more clear and specific your prompt, the more likely you are to get useful output. Another important part of prompt engineering is iteration. Evaluate output and revise your prompts, This will also help you get the results you need when leveraging conversational AI tools in the workplace. The language model you utilize will learn from you, and
Tip: You may find it useful to run your scenario in more than one AI tool to compare the results. AI can speed up process and support your projects, but the human mind is still more powerful to discern quality of outputs.
As AI tools continue to evolve, businesses that embrace them will have a significant advantage in productivity and innovation. Whether you’re a marketer, designer, or entrepreneur, leveraging AI can streamline processes and unlock new possibilities for growth.
*Curated list of tools gather from Google AI Essentials training and America’s SBDC speakers: Kasia Johnson, Merge Forward and Crystal Darby, University of Texas at San Antonio, SBDC.
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