Running a small business often feels like you're wearing a dozen hats at once. You're the CEO, marketer, customer support lead, and maybe even the janitor. It's a constant juggle to keep up, especially when you see larger companies with what seems like unlimited resources.

This is where artificial intelligence can step in. It is not some futuristic, complex tech anymore. Using AI is more like hiring a practical sidekick that helps level the playing field. Today’s AI technology is affordable, easy to use, and can fit right into your daily work without requiring a computer science degree.

In this post, we'll walk you through a handpicked list of AI tools that can actually help your small business save time, cut costs, and improve your customer communication.

What are AI tools for small businesses?

What do we mean by "AI tools"? For most small businesses, it's software that can handle tasks that normally need a person. Think about writing emails, summarizing long conversation threads, transcribing calls, or setting repetitive workflows to run on their own.

Most of these tools run on what's called Generative AI (GenAI) and Large Language Models (LLMs). This is the technology that allows them to create new content, understand plain English, and provide useful replies.

The advantages are straightforward. Using AI tools can make your team more efficient by handling the tedious work, improve customer service with quick responses, help you get past writer's block, and pull valuable information from your daily business conversations.

How we selected the AI tools for this list

We didn't just pull these names out of a hat. To make this list genuinely useful, we measured each tool against a few criteria that are crucial for small business owners.

• Impact on Efficiency: We looked for AI tools that are great at automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks. The idea is to free up you and your team for the work that actually grows the business.
• Ease of Use: If an AI tool requires a week of implementing just to get going, it’s not a good fit. Everything on this list is intuitive enough for anyone on your team to start using quickly.
• Affordability: We know budgets are tight. We focused on solutions with transparent pricing and a good return on investment.
• Collaboration and Integration: Another app that doesn’t connect with your other software is the last thing you need. We picked AI tools that fit into your current workflow and help your team work together better. 

Quick comparison of top AI tools

Here’s a quick overview of the top AI tools we’ll be covering. Each one targets a different core need for a growing small business, from communication to content creation.

The 6 best AI tools for small business

Alright, let's get into the details. Here’s a closer look at what makes each of these AI tools a great pick for small businesses.

1. Missive

Missive is a collaborative communication platform that brings all your customer and internal messages into one unified inbox view. It’s designed to manage everything from email, SMS, WhatsApp, Instagram, Messenger, and live chat in a single place. This means your team can work together on replies behind the scenes without messy email forwards or CC chains. The platform is designed for a conversational experience, contrasting with traditional ticketing systems.

Why it's on the list: Missive’s AI features are built right into your team’s daily workflow, which makes them very practical. You can generate instant AI drafts for quick replies, get summaries of long conversation threads in seconds, translate messages on the fly, and even build powerful AI rules. For instance, you can set up a rule that automatically detects an angry customer's email and assigns it to a senior team member for immediate attention.

Pros and Cons: Missive's biggest strength is its all-in-one, multi-channel workspace that prevents important messages from getting lost. The collaboration features, like chatting internally on an email thread or co-authoring a reply in real-time, are a huge help for teams. It's AI-powered rules are incredibly flexible, allowing you to personalize the AI workflows to your specific business. Missive is very powerful for collaboration, but a solo founder might find it has more features than they need right at the start.

Pricing:

• Starter: $14/user/month
• Productive: $24/user/month
• Business: $36/user/month

2. Jasper

Jasper is an AI content automation platform built with marketing teams in mind. It helps you whip up high-quality marketing copy, blog posts, and social media updates. Its standout feature is "Jasper IQ," which learns your brand voice, style guide, and product details to make sure everything it creates sounds consistently like your brand.

Why it's on the list: Jasper has been a leader in the AI writing space for a while, and it's a good fit for small marketing teams trying to produce a lot of content without hiring more writers. Its intelligent Content Pipelines can automate the entire process, from brainstorming an idea to getting it published.

Pros and Cons: Jasper is great for creating first drafts and getting past writer's block. It has a ton of templates for different formats, which is very helpful. The AI's output always needs a human eye for fact-checking and fine-tuning. Plus, while Jasper is useful for creating content, you’ll need a different tool to manage the customer conversations that result from it.

Pricing:

• Pro: Starts at $59/seat/month (billed annually)
• Business: Custom pricing

3. Microsoft 365 Copilot

Microsoft 365 Copilot brings AI help directly into the Office apps your business probably already uses, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook. It’s powered by an artificial intelligence layer called Work IQ, which gets to know you, your job, and your company to offer up tailored assistance.

Why it's on the list: For any business that relies heavily on the Microsoft suite, this tool is a natural fit. Its deep integration means there's almost no learning curve. You can ask it to draft an email in Outlook, create a presentation from a document in PowerPoint, or analyze data in Excel, all using natural language.

Pros and Cons: The smooth integration is its biggest advantage, making it easy to be more productive in apps you already know. The downside is that it's an add-on, so you first need a qualifying Microsoft 365 Business plan, which pushes the total cost up. Also, its collaboration features are spread out across different apps, which can feel disconnected compared to a single, unified communication hub.

Pricing:

• $30/user/month (as an add-on to a qualifying Microsoft 365 plan)

4. Dialpad

Dialpad is an AI-powered platform for voice communications: calls, messages, and meetings. Its AI features are what make it stand out. It offers real-time voice transcription during calls, creates post-call summaries with clear action items, and even gives agents live coaching with "AI Live Coach Cards" that pop up with helpful tips while they're on a call.

Why it's on the list: Dialpad is a great tool for sales and support teams who spend most of their day on the phone. It gives them live insights to improve their performance on the spot and automates note-taking with post-call summaries, freeing them up to focus on the conversation.

Pros and Cons: The real-time voice intelligence is a huge plus for any team that relies heavily on phone calls, and the AI analytics help managers spot trends without digging through call logs. However, Dialpad's main strengths are in voice and video. If your team also handles a lot of email, SMS, and social media messages, you might find you still need another tool to bring all those text-based channels together.

Pricing:

• Standard: $15/user/month
• Pro: $25/user/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

5. Freshdesk

Freshdesk is customer service software that comes with an AI chatbot named Freddy. The Freddy AI Agent can handle complex and repetitive customer questions on its own, across different channels. Meanwhile, the Freddy AI Copilot acts as a sidekick for human agents, helping with conversation summaries, reply suggestions, and the ability to analyze sentiment.

Why it's on the list: This is a specialized chatbot that can help a small business offer 24/7 support and automate the most common questions. Freshworks states it can resolve up to 80% of queries, which is a big help if you're trying to scale customer service without hiring a lot of people.

Pros and Cons: Freshdesk is excellent for managing support tickets and building out a self-service knowledge base, with it's AI chatbot helping to answer common questions before they even reach an agent. Its ticketing-based system offers a structured approach to customer support, which differs from the conversational model of an inbox-style tool. It's also heavily focused on external customer support rather than broader team collaboration or internal comms.

Pricing:

• Growth: $19/agent/month (billed annually)
• Pro: $55/agent/month (billed annually)
• Enterprise: $89/agent/month (billed annually)

6. Grammarly

Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that offers smart suggestions on grammar, clarity, tone, and style to make your writing better. Its newer generative AI features can help you rewrite sentences, and it has specialized AI agents like a "Paraphraser" and "Proofreader" to help with specific writing tasks.

Why it's on the list: It's a simple, essential tool that helps everyone on your team to write more clearly and professionally, whether they're crafting an email, a marketing post, or a project update. It works across thousands of different apps and websites, so it's always there when you need it.

Pros and Cons: Grammarly's main strength is its simplicity and the fact that it can be used almost anywhere. It improves your writing. While its generative AI features are handy for rewriting and brainstorming, it's not built for creating long-form content from scratch. It also doesn't help with managing team communication workflows, like assigning tasks or collaborating on a customer response.

Pricing:

• Free: Basic writing suggestions and 100 AI prompts/month
• Pro: Starts at $12/member/month (billed annually) with 2,000 AI prompts/month
• Enterprise: Custom pricing

How to choose the right AI tool for your business

When you're starting to use AI, it can be a daunting task. Here are a few simple tips to help you pick the right tool for your business. 

• Start with your biggest headache. Don't just use AI for the sake of it. Figure out what the most time-consuming or frustrating part of your business is. Is it answering every single customer email? Writing social media posts? Find an AI tool that solves that specific problem first.
• Look for tools that integrate. The best tools are the ones that play nicely with the software you already use. If there is no native connection, you could look into AI-powered workflow and automation builders (like Relay.app) that can connect apps together, making it easier for your team to adopt and will keep your data from getting trapped in different siloed places. For example, Missive integrates with over 25 apps like Salesforce, Shopify, and Asana. 
• Prioritize a unified workspace. Juggling a bunch of different apps can create more problems than it solves. Look for platforms that combine a few key functions, like communication and task management, to keep your team on the same page and working from one source of truth.
• Take advantage of free trials. Just about every AI tool on this list offers a free trial or a free version. Give them a spin with your team. See which one feels the most natural and provides the most value before you put any money down.

For a broader look at how different AI tools can impact a business, check out this video. It covers a range of applications and might spark some new ideas for how you can leverage AI in your own operations.

Can I use AI tools without technical expertise?

Adopting any new technology can be intimidating but AI is getting more and more user friendly everyday. With a common dialogue-focused interface and natural language usage, you can often just tell these AI tools what you're trying to do and they can provide insights into how to achieve it. Sometimes, the AI technology can actually optimize the set up work for you. 

The future is collaborative and intelligent

AI is no longer a luxury just for big corporations. For small businesses, it’s a useful partner that can help you improve productivity, put tedious work on autopilot, and deliver the kind of customer experience that builds loyalty.

The right tool can analyze and unlock valuable insights and give your team the breathing room to focus on what really matters: growing the business and building great relationships with your customers.

And the best place to start is by getting the foundation of your business streamlined: your communication.

Ready to see how AI can streamline your team's communication? Try Missive for free and bring all your conversations into one collaborative, intelligent inbox.