Five ways for startup founders to save time with AI

2023 was the breakthrough year for artificial intelligence (AI). It’s gone from a talking point for technology firms to a publicly accessible tool that anyone can use.

A big part of AI’s popularity comes from its wide range of applications. Whatever your business or sector, it’s almost guaranteed that AI is being deployed in one way or another.

Current examples of AI in business include:

• Managing complex production processes in manufacturing
• Streamlining retail inventory, sales and processes
• Using data from prescriptions to uncover valuable insights in healthcare
• Optimizing energy grid maintenance 

For startups and small businesses, AI has been a game changer. It can bring new skills into the business, providing support with tasks like marketing, coding and data analysis. Above all, it’s a valuable tool to help you save time and drive efficiencies, allowing you to focus on what matters most. 

Here are five easy ways to start using AI and get time back in your business.

Personalize marketing campaigns

A lot of startup founders have already been utilizing Generative AI (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT for content generation. It’s a useful way to create blog ideas, social media posts and product descriptions quickly – all those small-but-important tasks that consume founders’ time.

You can build on this to not only speed up marketing tasks but create more meaningful connections with your customers. 

AI can also be used to analyze customer data and create new segments based on factors like demographics, past engagements and buying behavior. From there, it can create personalized marketing campaigns and targeted messaging for each segment, giving you a much higher chance of success.   

Sort and prioritize emails 

An overflowing inbox can feel overwhelming, and require hours – if not days – to sift through. It’s all too easy to accidentally delete an important message or miss an urgent deadline if you’re trying to clear your inbox in between other tasks.

The Microsoft 365 Copilot launched in 2023 and is leading the pack on productivity tools. The AI co-pilot is integrated with Outlook and will highlight the most important emails so you can prioritize them by urgency. It can also save you time on crafting responses by summarizing long email threads and drafting suggested replies. 

Speed up customer service

Customer loyalty is important to any business, but it’s especially critical when your startup is in its early stages. A strong community and positive word of mouth can do wonders for brand recognition and sales, and give you a solid foundation to grow from.

However, building and maintaining customer relationships will inevitably become challenging as you grow. You’ll have more purchases and customer queries coming through, but less time to dedicate to responding promptly. 

With the latest GenAI tools, you can input customer questions as prompts and have the tool immediately give you a response. It’s particularly useful if you need to comb through data to find a record of a customers’ order number or purchase history – what might take you 10 or 15 minutes would take an AI seconds.

The caveat is, of course, that AI still has its limitations. It can’t empathize or understand intangible factors like ethics in the same way a human would, so make sure you – or an employee – are checking its outputs before you hit send.  

Analyze data and spot trends

Having visibility over your business is vital when you’re working on it alone or with a very small team. You need to be able to work efficiently and know where to invest your time and resources for the biggest impact.

This is one of the best uses for AI. Few founders have the time to get stuck into their company’s data often, which can result in missed opportunities or a failure to spot warning signs before there’s an issue.

AI can provide accurate, timely data analysis. You can use AI to analyze trends, develop useful summaries and create visualizations that break down information in an accessible way. 

If you want to go deeper into your data, you can also prompt AI to create custom formulas for software like Microsoft Excel in an instant.

Research competitors and sales leads

Finally, AI can be a transformative tool when it comes to research. As your startup grows, you might want to move into a new region or vertical, which would require in-depth research into new target markets and competitors.

AI can dramatically speed up this task, processing and analyzing large amounts of data in seconds. While there are ongoing questions about algorithmic bias in AI, it’s still a great tool to help you get a different perspective on your data and reduce your own conscious or unconscious bias.

In addition to market research, AI is also a huge time-saver when it comes to sales. Technology can’t replace your own passion and knowledge, but it can do a lot of the background work required to get a foot in the door.

You can use AI tools to:

• Search for potential prospects (e.g. if you sell natural, vegan cookies, you might search for health food stores or vegan supermarkets in a specific region)
• Check which prospects match your target customer profile and prioritize outreach by the closest match
• Identify the relevant contact on LinkedIn (you’ll need to suggest some job titles to search for) and source their email address and phone number
• Create a tailored sales pitch for each lead to increase your chances of success 

By letting AI take care of the research, you’ll have more time to spend on the parts of sales that require the human touch: empathizing with customer needs, building relationships, and connecting with people on a deeper level.