10 ways any small business can integrate AI (even a cupcake store!)

AI is being quickly adopted within the tech sphere, but many small businesses are still sleeping on the potential of integrating AI into their business because they are intimidated, don't know how to select good tasks for AI to help with, or just don't think AI is applicable to their "type" of business.

In this article we will show you 10 ways (including example bots) any small business can integrate AI to save time, increase efficiency, filling skill gaps and more, all through the lens of a small company you typically wouldn't associate with AI.

Head's up, Angela and Cake My Day aren't real people or businesses, they've been invented purely for illustrative purposes

Meet Angela from "Cake My Day", a small cupcake store in Newquay, Cornwall.

Angela's eyes sparkled as she gazed out at the rolling waves of Newquay, Cornwall. It had been six months since she'd left her high-stress city job to open "Cake My Day," her dream cupcake shop in this picturesque coastal town. While business was booming, Angela found herself spending more time in the kitchen than on her surfboard. The constant demands of being a solo entrepreneur were taking their toll, and she wondered if she'd ever find the perfect work-life balance she'd envisioned.

One particularly busy afternoon, as Angela was frantically answering emails, taking orders, and trying to frost a batch of sea-salt caramel cupcakes, she overheard two customers chatting about how AI was revolutionising their small businesses. Intrigued, she decided to explore how this technology could help her ride the wave of success while actually getting back on the waves she loved.

1. Generating product descriptions

Angela had always struggled with words and always found the copy she wrote for social media, her website or wherever else boring, and it certainly didn't do her quite frankly phenomenal cupcakes justice. She dreaded trying to describe her creations in a captivating way when positing to social media.

Sick of her lacklustre cupcake descriptions, she built a custom bot where she could upload photos of a new cake, and the bot would give it a mouth-watering name and description far better than anything she could come up with.

This bot saves Angela precious time describing her cupcakes but hopefully you could see how something similar could help any business with descriptions for products or estate agents with property descriptions etc.

2. Customer support

Angela likes to leave her phone at home when she goes surfing, but recently she hasn't felt like she could do that because she's inundated with customers emailing her the same questions over and over again. "Do your cakes contain nuts?", "How long does an order take", "Can I check the status of my order".

Since then she's added a customer support bot to her site and it now handles 90% of her customer queries, and can even do things like look up shipping statuses for orders. The bot knows everything about her business, she trained it on the content on her website, it is available 24/7, and if there's a question it can't answer it escalates the request to her anyway.

3. Generating content for her website

Angela has been reading about SEO and thinks it would be a good idea to create some SEO landing pages on her site. Pages like "Cupcakes for weddings", "Cupcakes for birthdays", "Cupcakes for baby showers".

The thought of having to write content manually for each of those pages fills her with dread so she creates a bot that can generate content for her website pages using her desired tone of voice while making use of the page builder component types she has available to build out pages in her CMS.

Using her new bot she's able to create 30 new pages in a day, not only that but the copywriting is far better than anything she could have produced herself!

4. Brainstorming new product ideas

When Angela first started Cake My Day 6 months ago she had a huge backlog of cupcake ideas but she has quickly exhausted them. She's hit baker's block, and is struggling to come up with new unique ideas. That was true until she created her "Cupcake ideas" bot that could help her brainstorm and refine ideas.

The bot knows all of her previous recipes and now she can simply ask things like "Come up with some unique Halloween themed cupcake ideas" and she'll be presented with a number of ideas to get her creative juices flowing, and she can go back and forth to refine ideas with the bot. Bye bye baker's block.

5. Personalised cold outreach

Angela is thinking of more ways to get her business exposure and thinks there is potential to partner with local businesses that hold events like weddings etc.

She plans to cold email a list of local event venues but the only problem is she absolutely sucks at writing emails. Not to worry, she creates a bot where she provides it a link to the target businesses' website, the bot does its research on the business, and then drafts a cold email personalised to that business and how they could collaborate with Cake My Day.

Using her cold outreach bot Angela is able to send 50 really high-quality personalised emails to her targeted business in a morning.

6. Internal knowledge bots

Angela is a solo business owner at the moment, but she has aspirations to expand so has been building up her company workspace in Notion. It contains all her recipes, processes, supplier information, instructions on how to handle support queries, post orders, and more. This will be invaluable when she adds to her team.

To solve the problem of finding things in her documented business, she's created a bot that uses her Notion workspace as its knowledge base so she can ask it any question and get results back instantly. "I've run out of flour, what's the number of Cornwall baking supplies", "What's the recipe for my ice cream deluxe cupcake".

7. Marketing ideas

Angela's cup cake business is going well, but baking is her strong point, not marketing. She knows marketing is important, but often struggles to know where she should be focusing her marketing efforts.

To help with this she now has an awesome marketing ideas bot that knows everything about her business and can help her brainstorm marketing ideas and campaigns that are completely bespoke to Cake My Day.

8. Writing newsletters

Angela's best mate Craig keeps banging on about "how newsletters are all the rage at the moment, and she should really start a newsletter for her customers to keep them up to date with everything Cake My Day".

She quickly remembers that she can just create another bot to help her do this and the "Cupcake Chronicles" newsletter bot is born.

Now all she has to do is outline some top-level points for each newsletter and the bot drafts the rest. A few small tweaks and it's ready to send. She notices a huge uptake in return customers after launching her newsletter.

9. Workflow automation and data extraction

All businesses have some very boring repetitive tasks that owners dread. For Angela that involves storing and recording her ingredient expense receipts. She was sick of the piles of paper receipts clogging up her desk, so she built a bot that will file and organise them into a neat searchable Notion table for her.

All she has to do is upload a snap of the receipt and the bot extracts all the important information and adds it to her Notion table, where she can find all her receipts in one place.

More time for surfing

Six months after implementing these AI solutions, "Cake My Day" had become the talk of Newquay. Angela's cupcakes were in high demand for weddings and events across Cornwall. Best of all, she was finally living her dream – running a successful business while having plenty of time to surf.

The story of "Cake My Day" provides a great example of how with a little creativity and the right technology, small business owners can have their cake and eat it too.

By leveraging AI, entrepreneurs like Angela can optimise their operations, enhance customer experiences, and find more time to pursue their passions. So, whether you're running a bakery, a boutique, or any small business, consider how AI might just be the secret ingredient to your success and satisfaction.