July 6, 2026 · by David Gilbert · 3 min read · Tech & AI
I get asked some version of "what AI should I be using?" almost every week now, usually from a small business owner who feels like they're falling behind but isn't sure where to actually start. The honest answer is that you don't need thirty tools. Most small businesses I work with end up settling on somewhere around four or five that they actually use regularly, and that matches what I'm seeing reported across the small business world generally — a manageable little "stack," not an overwhelming pile of subscriptions.
Start With a General Assistant
Whatever you pick — and there are several good options now — having one general-purpose AI assistant you go to first is the foundation. Drafting emails, brainstorming a marketing angle, summarising a long document, getting a second opinion on a tricky client message before you send it. This is the tool that earns its keep on sheer daily volume of small tasks, even before you touch anything fancier.
Then Look at Where Your Actual Time Goes
This is the bit people skip, and it's the most important step. Before adding any other tool, track honestly where your hours actually disappear for a week. For a lot of the small businesses I work with around Young, it's one of three things: answering the same handful of customer questions over and over, creating social content and marketing material, or admin and bookkeeping. Pick the tool that attacks your actual biggest time-sink, not the one everyone's talking about.
- Customer questions on repeat — a simple chatbot on your website or Facebook page that handles FAQs can hand back hours a week, particularly for anyone selling online or fielding the same five questions daily.
- Marketing and content — tools that help draft social posts, resize images for different platforms, or generate a first-pass product description are genuinely useful, provided a human still reads everything before it goes out. I cannot stress that "before it goes out" part enough.
- Admin and bookkeeping — modern accounting software increasingly has AI features built in for categorising expenses and flagging anomalies, which is a quiet, unglamorous time-saver that adds up fast.
The One Rule I Won't Bend On
Nothing client-facing goes out without a human reading it first. Not because the tools are unreliable exactly, but because they don't know your specific client's history, quirks, or the inside joke you've had running with them for three years. AI-generated content increasingly sounds polished and human, which is exactly why it needs a human check before it represents your business — polished and wrong is worse than rough and right.
What I'd Skip, At Least For Now
Anything that requires a long, complex setup before it delivers any value, and anything that promises to fully automate a part of your business you haven't fully understood yourself yet. If you don't know exactly how you currently handle a task, automating it usually just means automating the confusion, faster.
The Bit Nobody Selling AI Tools Wants to Tell You
Plenty of small businesses are increasingly putting real value back on "real human voices" precisely because so much content out there is starting to sound the same. Customers can tell, even when they can't quite articulate how. The tools are genuinely useful for getting things done faster. They're not a replacement for sounding like an actual person who actually knows their customers — which, conveniently, is the one thing AI still can't fake convincingly, no matter how good it gets.