Getting Started with AI for Your Small Business

You’ve heard the buzz about AI transforming businesses, but every guide you find assumes you’re a tech expert with hours to spare. Here’s the truth: you don’t need to understand how AI works to use it effectively. You just need to know what to ask.

Start With What’s Already on Your Plate

The best place to begin isn’t with some grand AI strategy. It’s with the tasks that eat up your time every single week:

• Email responses that follow similar patterns
• Social media posts that need fresh angles on the same topics
• Customer FAQs you’ve answered a hundred times
• Meeting summaries that take longer to write than the meeting itself

Pick one. Just one. That’s your starting point.

The 15-Minute Test

Here’s a simple experiment you can run today:

1. Open ChatGPT (the free version works fine) or Claude
2. Describe a task you do regularly: “I need to write a follow-up email to a customer who asked about our return policy”
3. Give context about your business and tone
4. See what it produces

You’re not looking for perfection. You’re looking for a starting point that saves you time.

What AI Does Well (and What It Doesn’t)

AI excels at:

• Drafting content you’ll edit
• Brainstorming ideas and variations
• Summarizing long documents
• Creating templates and frameworks
• Answering “how would I say this differently?”

AI struggles with:

• Knowing your specific customers
• Making strategic business decisions
• Handling anything that requires current, specific data
• Replacing genuine human connection

The goal isn’t to hand everything over to AI. It’s to use AI for the repetitive parts so you can focus on the parts that actually need you.

Your First Week

Day 1-2: Identify three repetitive tasks. Write down exactly what you do for each.

Day 3-4: Try AI for the simplest one. Copy your best example into the AI and ask it to create a template.

Day 5-7: Use that template three times. Note what works and what needs adjusting.

By the end of the week, you’ll have a clear sense of whether this particular use case saves you time—and you’ll know exactly how to refine it.

Want More?

Our book 365 Days of Doing Business with AI gives you one practical tip per day, each with ready-to-use prompts and implementation steps. No jargon, no coding, just results you can measure.

Check it out on Amazon →