If you sometimes feel like a rabbit in the headlights when it comes to AI, you’re not alone. I know that feeling well — it’s exactly how I felt eight years ago when I was first tasked with figuring out whether AI could help the business I was working in.

Back then, I was a CTO in a cloud software company, convinced that the data we collected could help customers win more sales. The challenge? I had no idea how AI really worked. The jargon, the maths, the complexity — it was overwhelming.

But persistence paid off. Over time, it began to click, and I could see the potential. Eventually, I built a state-of-the-art AI system that gave our customers real insight into how to win more deals. It gave us a competitive edge — but with one big catch: only large, well-established companies with huge datasets could benefit. And it wasn’t cheap.

Then in 2022, everything changed. ChatGPT arrived. For the first time, there was a universal, affordable AI tool that anyone could use — not just big businesses with deep pockets.

And that’s where small businesses like yours are in a unique position. We can use AI to become more efficient, more competitive, and grow faster.

So, how do you get started?

What AI Really Is (in 2025)

When people talk about AI today, they usually mean Large Language Models (LLMs) — the technology behind ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, and others.

In simple terms, these systems predict the next word in a sentence based on massive amounts of training data from the internet. The result? Responses that sound natural, make sense, and can be surprisingly useful.

They’re not perfect. They sometimes “hallucinate” (make things up), struggle with basic logic (like counting the number of ‘r’s in “strawberry”), and don’t know about events beyond their training cut-off. But they’ve improved dramatically, and new features like memory, reasoning models, multimodal inputs (text, voice, images, video), and tool access make them more powerful than ever.

Think of AI today as:

An assistant with broad general knowledge (up to a point).
A piece of software you can program in plain English to carry out tasks.

The AI Playbook: Crawl → Walk → Run

Adopting AI doesn’t have to be overwhelming. I like to think of it as three stages:

1. Crawl: Boost Personal Productivity

This is where most small businesses should start.

Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Grok all offer free tiers. You simply type in a prompt, ask a question, and get an answer.

I use these daily for:

Drafting emails
Brainstorming ideas
Troubleshooting problems
Market research
Summarising blogs into LinkedIn posts
Even checking contract terms

One of my favourite purpose-built tools at this stage is a meeting notetaker (I use Fathom). It records, transcribes, and summarises Zoom or Teams calls. I review my performance, check points I missed, and even feed the summary into ChatGPT to draft follow-ups.

At this stage, costs are minimal, setup is quick, and the time saved is immediate.

Crawling - Good for taking meeting notes, brainstorming, marketing content, reviewing and summarising documents and drafting emails.

2. Walk: Automate Business Workflows

Once you’re comfortable with AI assistants, the next step is automation.

Tools like n8n, make.com, or Zapier let you connect different systems together. AI can then slot in to perform tasks along the way.

Example: handling enquiries from your website.

A customer fills in a contact form.
AI reads the message and routes it to the right team (sales, billing, support).
The workflow replies automatically, confirming receipt.

For one client, this eliminated the need for a full-time staff member to manually triage messages. Faster responses, lower costs, happier customers.

The key here is that AI becomes a worker in your business, making decisions and carrying out tasks on your behalf.

Walking is about automating business processes with workflow backed with AI

3. Run: Put AI at the Core of Your Business

The most powerful step is to give AI access to your own data.

ChatGPT doesn’t know your business — unless you connect it. Tools now exist to safely integrate AI with your company’s documents, CRM, customer data, and more.

One example: I worked with a small training company whose course questionnaires were locked away in their software. We built an AI system that extracted the data, stored it in an analytics database, and created an AI assistant on top.

Now, their team can ask:

“What challenges do participants face before starting a course?”
“What feedback did people give about the instructors?”

The AI responds with clear answers, charts, or summaries — no technical skills required. Better yet, the business is now exploring selling this as a new service to their own clients.

At this stage, AI isn’t just saving time — it’s creating new opportunities and revenue streams.

Running - Giving AI access to your systems and data so it can perform more personalised and useful tasks

Where AI Delivers Value Today

Bringing it all together, here are eight areas where AI can make an immediate impact:

Business advice & ideation
Conducting research
Preparing for and capturing meeting notes
Writing emails & communications
Generating marketing content (blogs, posts, slides, images, videos)
Automating repeatable processes
Building modest internal software tools
Chatting with your company documents to unlock insights

Looking Ahead

We’re still at the start of a 10-year journey with AI. Costs are falling, competition is fierce, and the technology is becoming a commodity. The winners won’t be the biggest companies — they’ll be the ones who learn to adopt, adapt, and experiment quickly.

Twenty years ago, small businesses were the first to embrace Salesforce and cloud computing — long before it became mainstream. The same opportunity exists today with AI.

The hardest step is the first one. But once you start, it gets easier — and the benefits compound quickly.

Final Thoughts

What makes your business unique — your products, services, data, and customer relationships — will always be your strength. AI simply gives you new ways to leverage that uniqueness.

So my advice? Start small. Experiment. Crawl before you walk, and walk before you run.

AI is here to stay — and those who act early will be the ones who thrive.

Small Business AI Playbook