It is estimated that there’ll be 1.2 billion AI tool users globally by 2031. Businesses are among the top users of AI platforms as these tools help them in numerous ways.
The market is filled with tons of AI apps, and it isn’t easy for businesses and marketers to find the right ones.
This article explores the benefits of using AI tools and unleashes the best AI tools for small businesses that will help you automate different business processes.
What is an AI Tool?
An AI tool or AI app is a platform that uses artificial intelligence to perform a specific task. It’s a broad term that’s used for all types of apps that use artificial intelligence or machine learning.
For instance, chatbots are used extensively by businesses to offer swift customer support services to their customers. These chatbots leverage artificial intelligence, machine learning, NLP, and other techniques to communicate with people.
Generative AI is an advanced version of conventional AI that focuses on creating new content in the form of text, image, video, and others based on a prompt from a user.
The use of such AI tools and apps has increased significantly in recent times as they are best at automating routine tasks. According to a recent survey, 78% of businesses said that their organization uses AI for at least one business function. The use of generative AI increased from 33% in 2023 to 71% in 2024.
Benefits of Using AI Tools for Your Business
AI platforms have a lot to offer businesses of all sizes – and this is a reason why companies are in love with these tools.
Here’s a breakdown of the reasons and benefits why you should consider using AI tools for your business starting today:
Save Time
A survey found that 61% of businesses use AI to save time. Most of them use AI to automate repetitive tasks like data analysis, idea generation, content creation and editing, and more.
AI tools save time as they are best at automating repetitive tasks. Think of invoice generation for a small business. You can use an AI invoice generation tool that’ll generate accurate invoices, add journal entries, send reminders, and generate reports as needed.
These types of automation tools have been in use for years. AI and generative AI have made them even better and more sophisticated.
Cost Reduction
According to HBR, the use of AI reduces cost by 40-60%. Most businesses see a cost reduction due to the use of generative AI, according to a survey by McKinsey:
Artificial intelligence apps don’t cost a lot of money. Most of them are freely available, and the paid ones aren’t too expensive.
High competition among different apps makes it a highly cost-effective market for businesses.
At the end of the day, you get an AI tool at a fairly low subscription cost.
This makes it best for businesses because it acts as a double-edged sword.
You can perform traditional tasks quickly at a significantly lower cost with AI apps.
High Productivity
Artificial intelligence platforms have much higher productivity than manual work processes. It’s an undeniable fact.
For instance, tasks like email scheduling, graphic design, analyzing data, generating meeting summaries, etc., are typical tasks that AI software can do with minimal input, and the output is highly effective and accurate.
Research shows that the use of generative AI tools increases productivity for programming tasks by a whopping 125% while it’s lower for less complex tasks:
The study found that cognitive, complex tasks are performed more effectively and efficiently by AI apps and lead to higher productivity (compared to businesses that don’t use AI tools).
For instance, highly cognitive tasks require memory, creativity, skills, experience, and other abilities from individuals. AI tools outperform skilled workers by a big margin because these tools don’t lack any skill.
On top of that, generative AI has the ability to learn and evolve. Couple this with memory and data analysis, it can outperform any worker on any given day.
Scalability
When you use the best AI tools to run and manage your business, it gets easier to scale your business.
AI apps don’t require initial setup costs such as infrastructure upgrades, servers, or hardware. These tools are available via the cloud and offer a subscription-based pricing model (which makes them quite competitive).
All you have to do is upgrade your plan, and you are good to grow your business.
Not only is it easy to scale your business with AI apps, but the journey towards scaling gets much smoother and quicker.
Businesses that integrate AI into their daily operations grow at a much faster pace than companies that don’t use AI. For instance, Safe Superintelligence is a startup that’s valued at over $32 billion and has only 20 employees.
How did it manage to scale with 20 employees?
AI tools and apps.
Better Decision-Making
Around 40% of businesses say that they use AI to make prompt and accurate decisions.
Predictive and generative AI have the potential to analyze data and resources that humans need hours to compile and understand. This makes AI apps very powerful at making well-informed and data-driven decisions.
Deep Brew is an example of how Starbucks uses its AI platform to make data-driven decisions. It analyzes data including customer orders, and helps Starbucks make decisions related to inventory management, new store locations, and what marketing content to use in specific regions:
Businesses don’t necessarily have to develop their in-house AI apps, they can leverage existing platforms and improve decision-making across different departments.
Best AI Tools for Small Businesses
Now that you are aware (and convinced) that artificial intelligence tools are essential for your business in 2025, let’s dive into the best AI tools that you must use to grow your business at scale:
1. Best AI Tools for Image Generation
One of the best uses of generative AI is in image generation. These tools help businesses create images with a simple text prompt. You can then use these images on your website, social posts, email newsletter, ads, and more.
Here’s a list of the best AI apps for image generation:
Midjourney
Midjourney is one of the most popular AI image generation tools that can create a wide range of images based on text commands. You need to add input in the form of descriptive text, and the app generates an AI image based on your specific requirements.
The output images can be styled and customized making it an ideal tool for businesses and marketers. You can use it to create ready-to-use images without having to hire a designer.
The major features of Midjourney include:
- Text to image conversion
- Image customization and styling
- High-resolution images.
Pricing: It offers a free plan with limited access. Paid plans start from $10 per month.
DALL·E
DALL·E is the AI image generator tool by OpenAI. It is available within ChatGPT and lets you create stunning images based on text instructions.
It is more sophisticated than most of the other text-to-image generators as it is backed by OpenAI. The current version DALL·E 3 is much more advanced in terms of understanding prompts and delivering accurate images (compared to previous versions).
Here’s what makes DALL·E a must-have for small businesses:
- Easy to use as it’s embedded within ChatGPT
- Highly accurate images based on the prompt
- Keeps on improving with new upgrades.
Pricing: You can use it for free with limited access. Paid plans of DALL·E 3 start from $20 per month.
2. Best AI Tools for Content Creation
Content writing is an important element of any online business. You need content for social media, website, blog, marketing collateral, emails, and more. AI can help you and your writing team generate quality content, briefs, and outlines fairly quickly.
Here’s a list of the top writing AI tools that you should try:
Jasper
Jasper is an all-in-one content creation and marketing tool for businesses of all sizes. It has ready-to-use templates for a wide range of marketing projects such as blog posts, social media posts, ads, lead magnets, copywriting, sales page creation, and more.
It has an AI chat assistant that helps you tweak content and write anything by giving instructions. Since it offers templates, it makes your job much easier. All you have to do is add relevant details, and Jasper will create content for you.
The primary features include:
- Easy to use
- Several content writing templates to choose from
- Customization and branding options.
Pricing: The starting price of Jasper is $49 per month. You can use their platform for 7 days to see how it works.
Copy.ai
Copy.ai is another all-purpose content creation and marketing AI tool. It offers numerous templates to businesses, ranging from simple content creation to advanced workflows.
It focuses more on workflows that help you reduce repetitive tasks. For instance, you can create a workflow for image generation, social post generation, and a featured image for every post you generate with it. This lets you save a lot of time by minimizing the number of prompts.
Key features of Copy.ai include:
- Create content at scale
- Huge library of templates and workflows
- Customization features.
Pricing: Copy.ai has a free plan that offers you basic features with restrictions. Paid plans start from $49 per month.
Writer
Writer is another AI tool for content creation that offers a lot of additional features. It lets you automate content creation and marketing with the use of built-in AI agents (workflows).
For instance, you can create a blog post using the Blog Builder AI agent.
You can create custom AI agents with your own specific requirements. It is extremely easy to use and much simpler than Jasper and Copy.ai.
The primary features include:
- It uses its own learning model
- Advanced branding features
- More secure and transparent.
Pricing: You can use Writer for free for 14 days. Paid plans start from $39 per month per user.
Best AI Tools for Video Generation and Editing
AI apps work best for video generation and editing making it easier for businesses to create videos effortlessly. Like image and content creation, AI is equally useful in creating videos from scratch. Below is a list of the best AI tools for video generation:
Filmora
Filmora is a multipurpose video creation and editing tool that’s packed with tons of features. You can create new videos using AI and edit videos with its smart tools.
You can create videos from text and images. It also supports audio generation and sound effects. If you have an existing video, you can use AI to quickly edit it with tools like audio enhancer, object remover, short clip generator, and more.
Here’s a list of the core features of Filmora:
- A powerful, multipurpose video creation and editing tool
- Supports video, audio, and text
- Available for desktop and mobile apps.
Pricing: It comes with a free plan that gives you access to basic features. The paid plans start from $9.99 per month.
Invideo AI
Invideo AI is another AI video generation tool that makes it super-easy to create videos with a text prompt. It lets you edit AI-generated videos, which is a great feature that allows you to incorporate branding in every video you create.
You can also create animation videos, memes, and short clips for specific social media sites.
The primary features of Invideo include:
- Video templates that make it easy to create a new video in minutes
- It offers video editing features through its studio
- Supports music and voice cloning.
Pricing: Invideo AI has a free plan that gives you access to the basic features. You can switch to a paid plan and unlock more features for as low as $35 per month.
Runway
Runway is an amazing AI video generation tool that will blow you away. You can create a video from an image, text prompt, or use an existing video to edit and expand it using text prompts.
It generates high-quality, professional video output. You can tweak and edit videos with its editor for customization.
It is more focused towards professional videos for advertising, cinema, etc.
The core features include:
- Multiple AI tools to help you generate a professional-level video
- Use images to create a video automatically
- Expression management of the characters, motion brush, camera control, and fine-tuning are the most prominent tools.
Pricing: You can use Runway for free. If you want to get the most out of it, you can upgrade to a paid plan starting from $15 per month.
Best AI Tools for Customer Service
One of the best uses of AI apps is in customer service via AI agents or chatbots. These AI agents respond to customer queries in a timely manner. They can perform a wide range of tasks ranging from answering a simple query or performing a task such as placing a customer order.
Here’s a list of the best customer support AI agents:
Fin by Intercom
Fin is an AI agent by Intercom that’s able to deliver quality customer services like a human. It learns about your business, understands your tone and voice, and acts like a human agent.
It can handle SMS, emails, and live chat making it super helpful for small businesses. Fin can transform your customer service and handle everything for you with minimal supervision.
Here are the leading features of Fin:
- Supports multiple channels and touchpoints – not just your website
- You can train and customize it based on your business tone, voice, and style
- You can create workflows for Fin.
Pricing: You can use it with Intercom or as a standalone service. The price is based on per resolution which is $0.99 per resolution.
Zendesk AI Agents
Zendesk AI Agents are best at automating customer service. The AI agent works as a chatbot and customer support agent. It handles queries and tickets, and has the potential to solve all sorts of tickets.
These agents support websites, email, social media, and other channels with full support for more than 30 languages.
You can also leverage AI Copilot and automation that helps you create workflows and assign tickets to different team members. This can all be done by the AI based on the complexity of a ticket.
The primary features include:
- Fully automated support agents
- Ability to automate the entire customer support department
- Supports multiple channels and languages across different devices.
Pricing: AI Agents by Zendesk are available in its advanced plan, which costs $55 per month per agent. If you want to unlock advanced AI features like Copilot, automated workflows, and generative AI tools, it is available as an add-on at $50 per month per agent.
Best AI Tools for SEO
What could be better than using AI to improve the search visibility of your website? Here’s a list of the best AI tools for SEO:
Surfer
Surfer is a multipurpose SEO tool that helps you create and optimize content for SEO based on AI. You can use its AI content generator to create articles based on a keyword. The AI articles can be tweaked and optimized completely using built-in features and tools.
The core tool allows you to use AI-driven suggestions and recommendations to optimize content for search engines. Features like auto-optimize, auto link insertion, AI content detector, AI content humanizer, and others make it exceptionally easy to fully optimize any piece of content for SEO.
The major features include:
- An all-in-one AI content optimization tool
- Multiple advanced features to improve the search visibility of your site
- AI content generation tool.
Pricing: The starting price of Surfer SEO is $99 per month. There’s no free trial or plan, however, you can significantly lower the monthly fee by switching to annual billing.
MarketMuse
MarketMuse is a content creation and optimization tool that uses AI to help you write content that’s more likely to rank high in SERPs. It offers similar features to Surfer and works in a similar fashion.
What differentiates MarketMuse is that it helps you create a content strategy using competitive analysis, creating content clusters, and end-to-end content planning. This is all done by AI with minimal input.
AI tells you what keywords to target based on your site’s authority, that you are most likely to rank for. This is very helpful in developing a content strategy.
The main features of MarketMuse include:
- Helps you develop and execute a content strategy using AI
- Generate and optimize content
- Multiple AI tools to support content optimization.
Pricing: MarketMuse has a free plan that allows you to access basic features. Paid plans start from $149 per month.
Alli AI
Alli AI is a complete AI-driven SEO suite for agencies and SEO teams. It works in a simple and effective way.
You need to add its code to your website. It scans and analyzes your website’s SEO performance and suggests changes for improvement. You can check recommendations and approve or edit them as needed. Approved changes go live immediately.
It’s a complete AI-driven optimization platform where you don’t have to do much hard work.
The major features include:
- Automated SEO tool
- Live editor to help you edit your website without any need for coding
- SEO A/B testing.
Pricing: You can try Alli AI for 10 days and see how it works for your business. Paid plans start from $169 per month.
Final Words
The use of AI and non-AI tools is essential for your business. If you have a small business with limited resources, you should try AI apps to automate all types of tasks.
The best AI tools covered in this article will help you automate most parts of your business. But there’s a catch.
Having an AI tool doesn’t mean you can rely completely on these apps.
You need to try and test different AI platforms. Each tool requires a significant amount of time and resources for optimization. Most of them have a steep learning curve. You need to train and optimize the AI software to work perfectly with your business and other apps.
Buying and plugging in an AI app to your business won’t do wonders.
The output you get depends on the input. It comes down to how you use these AI tools.
Be flexible. Be open to trying multiple best AI tools for a single task. You might figure out that an app you have spent hours training doesn’t work as expected – and needs replacement.
This is all part of the game.
Be prepared for it – mentally and financially.
Featured Image: Pexels
