Must-know strategies and real-world examples for small businesses using AI

AI can be a valuable tool for small and midsize businesses (SMBs) looking to grow and improve their operations. But knowing where to start might feel overwhelming. There are lots of tools out there, but which capabilities are actually important and useful for your team? Can you afford AI tools that charge a premium per user? And how can you convince employees to change their old ways of doing things and actually use AI in their workday?

Read on for strategies and practical ways your small business can incorporate artificial intelligence to help your team do more while saving time.

Businesses are using AI in a variety of ways, but if you’re just starting down this path, you may be wondering what exactly AI can do for your employees. Here are some common uses of AI for a small business:

• Recapping meetings. AI can generate meeting summaries to help employees review important discussion points or get caught up on meetings they missed.
• Summarizing information. When you have a lot of reports or data to review, AI can help synthesize that information and provide a succinct summary. It can also summarize long emails or chat threads so you don't get stuck wading through all the unnecessary details.
• Composing messages. Whether your employees are emailing prospects or providing customer service, AI can compose messages to help them respond more quickly and efficiently.
• Writing a first draft. If you’re short on time or have limited resources, you can ask an AI assistant to help you write a business plan, a blog post, marketing copy, or a project brief.

If you want to introduce AI to your employees, there are a few things to keep in mind to make sure it’s used effectively and not seen as just another tool. Below, we’ve outlined a few strategies for choosing and implementing an AI solution.

Choose AI tools that work with what you already have

App overload is a real thing. According to our Global Collaboration in the Workplace survey, more than half of small business leaders (51%) said they often feel overwhelmed by the amount of tools and apps they need to use. If you’re going to introduce another piece of technology into the puzzle, look at how it integrates with what you already have. 

For example, if you already have an eligible paid Zoom Workplace plan, a built-in tool like AI Companion can create a more seamless experience with its ability to leverage contextual data from Zoom Meetings, Docs, Team Chat, Phone, and more to provide more helpful responses.

Identify the most helpful and valuable use cases for AI in your business

Don’t just implement AI for AI’s sake — start by identifying root issues or challenges that need to be solved and brainstorm how you can use AI capabilities to address them.

Maybe your latest pulse survey revealed that employees are struggling with the number of meetings they need to be in and are frustrated by a lack of follow-through from these meetings. AI-generated meeting summaries can provide details to those who don’t need to be part of the discussion but want to be kept in the loop on decisions. AI-generated docs can take those summaries and create a post-meeting project brief, identifying action items with clear steps to execute.

Train and educate employees

Once you’ve figured out how your small business could use AI, the next step is to enable your employees to use it. Consider how these AI workflows can be automated or clearly communicated to employees so they can begin to incorporate them as solutions to their common issues.

A survey conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of Zoom found that 25% of employees who don’t use AI at work say it’s because they’re not familiar with it, or because they don’t know how it could help them. Don't let this be a barrier to your AI implementation. Invest time and effort into onboarding and training your employees on how to use AI effectively to make it a natural and effective part of their workday.

As mentioned above, identifying challenges your teams might be facing and mapping them to AI use cases can help with implementing AI successfully. See if your teams could use help with any of the following.

Focus on what matters in meetings

When you’re meeting with a new client or important prospect, you want to make a good impression. You want to give them your undivided attention. As one small business leader we spoke with put it, “Going back after a meeting with a question when you should have been paying attention is the worst feeling in the world. You feel like you’ve already lost a customer.”

Using an AI note-taker like AI Companion can help you stay focused during the meeting while saving you time afterward, too. You won’t need to organize your notes or type up the action items to send to your client — AI Companion generates a summary broken down by topic and identifies next steps. And if you didn’t catch part of the discussion or have a question during the meeting, you can ask AI Companion in the side panel and get a response — your client will never know you missed a step.

Pro tip: You can enable AI Companion to start automatically at the beginning of every meeting you host. Automating that step is an easy way to integrate AI into your workday.

Get caught up on messages

If you often find yourself overloaded with information and struggling to sift through your emails, chats, and voicemails at the beginning of the workday, AI can act as your personal assistant, summarizing your messages and letting you know what to do first.

AI Companion for Zoom Workplace can summarize long email chains or chat threads. You can even ask specific questions about an email or chat, like “Was my name mentioned?” or “Provide an overview of key topics or action items” discussed in a chat channel. Plus, AI Companion can extract action items and prioritize your voicemails, letting you attend to the most important messages first.

Pro tip: Open the AI Companion side panel and explore how it provides focused responses depending on which email or chat channel is open in your app window.

Cut down on response times for better customer service

Once you’ve got a handle on your email and voicemail inboxes, you can use AI to help you compose responses. Getting back to customers about their inquiries and following up with prospects within hours contribute toward providing a better experience that can help you win loyal clients.

AI Companion works in both Zoom Mail and Zoom Team Chat to compose messages. Provide a prompt and let AI Companion generate the message using context from the entire thread. Then tweak the generated message to home in on the appropriate tone and length.

Pro tip: If the first generated response doesn’t hit the mark, provide specific feedback, including details that need to be included, to allow AI Companion to generate a more fitting message.

Jumpstart your brainstorming and creation

Small businesses need to be able to do more with less. If you don’t have the resources of a larger company, you might find your small team having to do the work of several departments: sales, marketing, business development, and more. Using AI helps give them a leg up on drafting a blog post or product launch brief, especially if it’s outside of their usual expertise. AI capabilities that are built into collaborative docs create a seamless workflow for creating and sharing.

That’s the experience you get with Zoom Docs. AI Companion can help you jumpstart a draft by pulling in information from meeting summaries, uploaded documents, and emails. You can tag colleagues, share your doc directly in Team Chat or Meetings, and co-edit docs together.

Pro tip: With AI Companion, your meetings become valuable material for AI-generated content in Zoom Docs. Simply enable the appropriate settings to allow Docs access to Zoom Meetings content, and you can create brainstorming docs, post-meeting summaries, a project update doc, and more by going to “My meetings” in the sidebar of your Docs tab.

If you're a small business using Zoom Workplace, you might be surprised to learn that our paid plans come with a wealth of AI features for collaboration and productivity. That means Zoom AI Companion,* our AI assistant, is included at no additional cost with your eligible paid plan. You don’t need to make room in your budget to pay for AI features, and you can provide these benefits more widely across your company, instead of only to a select few.

Additionally, because AI Companion is part of the Zoom Workplace platform, you can manage settings and view analytics from the Zoom portal. You don’t have to worry about managing yet another tool on a separate dashboard.

AI Companion is one of the many features that make Zoom Workplace an essential work platform. From collaborative docs to cloud calling, scheduling software, and team chat, it provides you with a toolkit for running and growing your business and staying connected with customers.

For more tips on using Zoom Workplace with AI Companion to power your small business, check out our webinar.

*Zoom AI Companion may not be available for all regions or industry verticals. Included at no additional cost with the paid services in your Zoom user account.