Survive the AI Apocalypse: 7 Areas for Small Business Adoption

Will you survive the AI apocalypse? I’m sure you’ve heard all the talk about AI (artificial intelligence) because it’s part of every news report, TV drama, and movie containing references to how it might change the nature of our world as we know it. Well, have you ever thought about how your small business will survive the AI apocalypse that’s heading your way? Today, we’ll share our top seven tips to help your small business survive the AI apocalypse.

Maybe you find the notion of an AI apocalypse frightening or intimidating. As a small business owner, the reality is that AI offers a sustainable competitive advantage for small businesses that get a jumpstart by learning how to use AI technology and tools to improve business performance. With this head start on the competition, AI becomes a small business’s best friend by transforming the way you do business to outcompete late adopters. With the information we share today, along with an entire week devoted to AI last week (see Generative Engine Optimization and AI posts), you’ll learn to survive the AI apocalypse and may even thrive in it.

Survive the AI apocalypse

Some days it feels like you’re already drowning in tasks just to keep your business afloat. The thought of adding one more task to the never-ending list seems impossible. But now is the best time to make the leap into AI because everyone else is in basically the same boat, learning to use these new technologies. As the technologies advance and likely become much more expensive, you’ll wish you’d jumped in when AI was in its infancy. It may be too late once it arrives to survive the AI apocalypse.

In addition, you’ll find that most AI tools are a huge time-saver, reducing tasks that formerly consumed hours to just half that time (or less). And most AI tools are relatively easy to learn (at least for now) because they act like a conversation between your staff and knowledgeable external personnel who help you get things done. Sure, it takes a little effort to discover the best ways to communicate (and sometimes these tools are just plain dumb), but you can say the same thing about every new staff member you bring on. With a little trial and error, frustration, and effort, you can survive the AI apocalypse.

Lapping your competition

If you thought AI was only accessible to large corporations with deep pockets and hundreds of trained tech workers, think again. You can add several AI tools for around $20 each as the LLM (large language models) work on building their reputation, increasing their user base, and proving their value. That might not always be the case (in fact, having worked in the tech marketing world for several decades, I can almost guarantee the cost will explode someday). These tools can automate tasks, gain insights, and enhance the customer experience, which helps you lap the competition.

Adopt AI strategically

It helps to think of AI adoption as a series of small steps that help you survive the AI apocalypse rather than an all-or-nothing situation. Before you embark on your journey through AI, consider the plethora of tools available (we share a list of them below, along with the tasks performed by each one) and identify ones that perform the tasks that you deal with consistently and consume a lot of your time. By tacking these onerous tasks with AI tools, you’ll quickly find that the effort you spent learning how to use them effectively is more than compensated for by the time savings and improved insights that they bring.

1. Content creation

Content creation is my biggest challenge as I produce long-form content that my readers are likely to find valuable on a weekly basis (typically four to five times per week). Content creation takes hours of research every day to write and edit this content, find or create unique images, and conduct the tasks necessary to achieve a good search rank with the resulting posts on my website and social media.

I also create a video series to help small businesses improve their market performance. These videos require filming, editing, and posting on YouTube to achieve a good search rank. If you haven’t subscribed to my channel or viewed my videos yet, what are you waiting for? They provide serious insights to grow your business and they’re free.

AI tools like Gemini and ChatGPT are around $20 a month each, but provide much more than that in terms of value. Use them for crafting blog posts, creating unique images, providing ideas for marketing campaigns, writing social media posts, and even analyzing customer data to improve your marketing efforts.

2. Customer Service

It’s hard to overstress the importance of providing superior customer service, yet the cost of providing these services can really throw a monkey wrench in your budget. Plus, you’ll find it challenging to provide 24/7 customer service without breaking the bank if you run a small business.

One solution comes in the form of AI-powered chatbots that provide always-on customer support from your website to address customer concerns and answer questions. Because many of these chatbots include machine learning, they continually improve their performance over time. While chatbots aren’t suitable for every task (including ones that require empathy or other emotions or very complex tasks), they can often handle a significant proportion of your customer service, leaving your human customer service reps to be more responsive to these tasks.

3. Administrative tasks and financial management

While these tasks might not be time-consuming individually, when you add up all the time you spend on them, it’s likely to surprise you. What if you could reduce the time and effort it takes to perform these tasks, especially those repetitive tasks that seem to swamp your day?

Using AI to handle simple, repetitive tasks like scheduling appointments, managing email messages, and transcribing meetings. Marketing automation, which involves scheduling a bunch of social media posts in a single sitting, reduces the disruption caused by frequently stopping to post something at the appropriate time.

Running any type of business involves bookkeeping, preparing and tracking invoices, and developing forecasts that keep your business running smoothly. Using AI tools can easily handle these tasks for you at a reasonable price.

4. Cybersecurity

Cybersecurity is a growing concern for businesses of every size, in every industry. But hiring trained cybersecurity personnel or paying for costly tools really eats into your budget. Consider using AI tools (like this one from Microsoft) to monitor your network, looking for anomalies that might indicate a threat before it becomes a serious problem.

5. Analytics

Modern businesses need accurate, detailed, and updated information to make better decisions and serve customers better. You can survive the AI apocalypse by adopting this one task even if you can’t justify the time and expense necessary to adopt any other AI tool.

Analytics provided by AI tools can help with the following insights necessary for better decision-making:

• Solve problems before they happen. For instance, an AI tool can help avoid stockouts by predicting inventory needs more accurately or anticipating supply chain issues based on historical data from a variety of sources.
• Develop a deeper understanding of your customers to offer customized communications and product suggestions based on identifying market segments within your data.
• Compare your business to similar ones to find strategic gaps that might provide growth opportunities.
• Process big data to identify trends and build forecasts that aid in better planning.
• Provide real-time data to make better time-sensitive decisions.
• Reduce bias and emotion in decision-making by encouraging data-based decisions.
• Support dynamic pricing to optimize revenue.

6. Customer relationship management

CRM or customer relationship management emerged several decades ago, as the old notion of marketing as composed of discrete transactions was replaced by the realization that keeping existing customers is 5X more valuable than having to replace them. AI-powered CRM tools help build stronger customer relationships, resulting in higher ROI and more revenue.

7. Manage supply chains

If nothing else good came from the Pandemic, we learned about the fragility of our supply chains. Using AI tools, it’s possible to employ prescriptive analytics (see below) that allow for supply chain optimization, not simply predictions of failures. You can use these tools to survive the AI apocalypse by planning the optimal routes that reduce fuel consumption, limit the potential for weather-related delays, and ensure goods reach your biggest customers on time.

Accessible AI tools for small businesses

You’ll find a number of AI tools to aid with each of these seven areas, which we display in the table below. Adopt the ones that solve your biggest problems first, then add others as you develop more familiarity with the ones you’re already using, have more bandwidth, and can allocate a larger budget.

You need people

The media makes a lot of dire predictions about the ability to survive the AI apocalypse, especially when it comes to human employment. I’m not so convinced we’ll eliminate humans, simply transform the tasks we need them to perform. Much like the personal computer replaced many of the tasks performed by a secretary, AI will transform the nature of human work.

At least for the foreseeable future, AI won’t become sentient, in my opinion, and that of many experts. You’ll see why I say this if you consider the accepted definition of a sentient being as one that feels, perceives, senses, and has emotions. I’m not even sure if AI can perform critical thinking tasks, instead mirroring what it thinks a sentient being might feel or think. For instance, an AI system performed much as we see depicted by the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey by protecting itself from being disabled. Is that critical thinking or simply performing as it’s learned from sentient beings to protect itself?

If nothing else, AI lacks creativity (look at the image below, created by Gemini when I asked for an image to accompany this post, to see its lack of creativity despite asking multiple times for the AI to fix the title), simply parroting from millions of pieces of content online. Plus, it’s the old story of garbage in, garbage out when the information it accesses is wrong.

Thus, while AI no longer sounds like a machine when communicating and can hold human-like conversations, it has a long way to go to even approach humans when it comes to the ability to develop real, human connections. This means humans will remain valuable for their ability to develop emotional intelligence, maintain genuine relationships, and think critically about new, potentially conflicting information.

Conclusion

Thus, you can survive the AI apocalypse, which likely isn’t an apocalypse at all, but a slow transition from the way we currently do things to the ways we’ll need to do them in the future. Albeit faster than most such transitions, it won’t happen overnight. If you embrace this new technology with the mindset of strategic adoption, focus on the practical applications of the technologies to solve your biggest problems, and remember that you still need a human to make the entire system work, you’ll emerge stronger and with a better competitive advantage.

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