12 Best AI Tools for Small Businesses in 2025

Small businesses must juggle multiple roles with limited staff, but AI can bridge the gap through automation, keeping execution strong even with a small team. By boosting productivity, artificial intelligence — including this list of best AI tools for small business — enables employees to punch above their weight and deliver more with fewer resources.

A recent survey shows that 95% of US companies are using AI to work more efficiently. It’s empowering teams to do more with less. This technology levels the playing field to some extent, giving small businesses access to AI capabilities that were once limited to large enterprises.

In this article, we’ll review the best AI tools helping SMBs in 2025.

Why AI Tools Are Necessary for Small Businesses

Artificial intelligence tools can make a real difference for small businesses.

SMB teams wear many hats

Small businesses often have limited staff, so owners and employees must fill diverse roles, including sales and marketing, HR, support, and finance. According to an American Express survey, 87% of SMB founders agree that entrepreneurs wear multiple hats while running their business.

With so much on their plate, there’s a constant risk of burnout or missed opportunities. AI for small businesses automates tasks that would otherwise require hiring new employees or using overtime for existing staff. This means the same team can handle more work.

AI solutions fill the gaps affordably

Hiring specialists for every need is costly for those with small budgets. AI tools offer a cheaper alternative. For example, using AI for data entry or email outreach frees dedicated staff for more critical activities. This way, businesses get more efficient. This efficiency indirectly influences their North Star metric, which focuses on business growth.

A recent McKinsey report found that redesigning workflows has the biggest effect on an organization’s ability to see the impact of generative AI usage on its earnings before interest and taxes.

AI’s plug-and-play ability makes it an affordable way to bridge skill gaps. These tools don’t take long to ramp up, and they can reliably reduce your stress when it comes to structured and straightforward tasks.

AI increases output with fewer resources

AI lets small teams accomplish the work of larger ones. For example, there are AI tools in customer service and support that automatically offer solutions to simple FAQs. Similarly, AI in content creation, coding, research, and almost every business function automates the repetitive and time-consuming complexities of your workday.

AI allows you to produce a larger output without the army of staff needed a decade ago to deliver the same amount.

AI unlocks strategic focus

With AI handling repetitive tasks, small business owners and staff can focus on higher-level work. Instead of manually writing every support ticket response or crunching numbers, teams spend time planning growth, building customer relationships, and innovating.

It gives you extra time amid the chaos that happens in smaller teams catering to many customers at once. You get to make well-thought-out decisions proactively rather than firefighting all the time, improving decision-making.

Minimal tech skill is required

AI tools are made for non-technical users. Most offer easy-to-use websites or mobile apps with intuitive interfaces, templates, and integrations. You need no coding expertise to start churning value. For example, ChatGPT offers a conversational AI chat window for tasks ranging from drafting emails to brainstorming ideas.

Even complex features, such as predictive analytics, are presented via simple dashboards. Small businesses can use it with a minimal learning curve, often by simply plugging it into existing workflows.

The result is a fast ROI without needing extensive support from an IT or data science team.

Get to better decisions, faster

AI tools provide valuable insights that enable small businesses to react quickly. Rather than relying solely on their gut feeling, owners can view trends and performance metrics in real time.

For instance, an AI analytics dashboard might indicate that sales are slowing in a particular region, prompting a swift strategic change. Even a simple AI tone checker ensures that client emails convey the right sentiment, enhancing business communications in real time.

This makes your day-to-day decisions better without requiring a lot of heavy lifting.

Best AI Tools for Small Businesses in 2025

Here are some of the best AI tools for small business to improve their operational efficiency.

1. Nextiva

Nextiva is a unified customer experience management platform that combines voice, video, SMS, chat, social media, and email into one interface, making it easy for small teams to manage all communications. You don’t need separate software for managing different solutions (for internal or external communication). Nextiva aggregates all of this into one platform, providing a more cost-effective approach to streamline omnichannel communications.

Its built-in AI adds powerful automation and insights for customer interactions. If you encounter any difficulties, Nextiva’s award-winning support is available to assist you, ensuring a seamless experience.

Most importantly, Nextiva’s AI-powered contact center solutions are positioned appropriately to integrate agentic AI with business systems. This gives you an edge to automate multistep processes around CX through AI in the foreseeable future.

Key AI features of Nextiva include:

• AI-powered call summaries and sentiment analysis: The platform transcribes calls and flags customer emotion in real time. You get to drive conversations intelligently, ensuring your customers are having the best experience.
• Intelligent IVR routing and automated workflows: Skill-based routing ensures that each customer is directed to the right agent. This routing is based on agents’ availability, expertise, time of day, geo location, and various other unique factors.
• Unified dashboard for all channels: Voice, chat, email, SMS, and social are managed in one app. Your customers don’t experience breaks in context when they switch channels.
• Real-time coaching and next-best-action prompts: AI suggests responses or upsells during calls. The real-time coaching and AI agent assist features ensure your team handles objections and other critical aspects of the conversation consistently. This makes CX uniform across channels.
• CRM integrations: Nextiva integrates with popular CRMs, including Salesforce, HubSpot, and others, to provide a cohesive system that streamlines your workflow.

Best for: Small businesses that want to consolidate all customer communication on a single platform. Nextiva’s all-in-one platform automates call summaries, routing, and reporting, enabling a lean support team to function like a complete AI contact center.

2. Jasper

Jasper is an AI content creation platform for marketing copy. It uses the GPT-4 model to generate blog posts, ad copy, social media content, product descriptions, and more, all with a consistent brand voice.

Users train Jasper on their company’s “brand voice” settings so that all output looks and sounds consistent with their brand. It offers customizable templates for blog outlines, email copy, and more.

Below are some key features of Jasper:

• Brand voice training: Tunes with your brand’s tone and guidelines.
• Templates: Includes templates for blogs, emails, ads, social media posts, and more.
• AI-powered brainstorming: Generates ideas or headings on a topic.
• Multilingual support: Delivers content in multiple languages to localize content for different geographies.

Best for: Content marketing teams, startups, and solo founders who need to scale blog, ad, or email content rapidly. Jasper automates writing tasks and provides brand consistency, ensuring your write-ups are SEO friendly and align with the tone and style of your messaging.

3. Flick

Flick is an AI social media scheduling and hashtag optimization tool. Its Iris AI assistant helps plan strategy and generate captions, while a hashtag tool ensures maximum reach. Flick supports scheduling to Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and LinkedIn and provides analytics on post performance.

Below are some key features:

• AI caption generator: Autofills post captions and ideas using AI.
• Trend and hashtag monitoring: Identifies and tracks top hashtags, monitoring their performance.
• Scheduling and analytics dashboard: Plans and queues posts across platforms with engagement reports.
• Instagram and TikTok integration: Delivers direct scheduling and analytics for major social networks.

Best for: Small brands and solopreneurs managing their social media. Flick’s Iris AI automation saves time, letting one person maintain an active social presence without hiring a social media manager.

4. Seventh Sense

Seventh Sense specializes in optimizing email marketing. It connects with HubSpot or Marketo to analyze subscriber behavior and then personalizes send times and frequencies for each contact.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all blast, Seventh Sense learns when individual leads are most likely to open and reply.

Below are some key features of Seventh Sense:

• Send-time personalization: Schedules each email to a recipient’s “ideal” time based on past engagement data.
• Frequency optimization: Sets optimal email intervals. You can segment contacts by engagement to avoid over-emailing.
• Integration with HubSpot and Marketo: Works as an add-on to these popular email CRMs.
• Engagement increase: Can increase open and reply rates through AI features.

Best for: B2B marketers who create multitouch emails with high engagement in mind. The platform optimizes send times, enabling even a small sales team to dramatically improve campaign performance.

5. Speechify

Speechify is a text-to-speech (TTS) app that turns written content into natural-sounding audio. You can use it on iPhone/Android or via a Chrome extension to have emails, documents, articles, or scanned images read aloud. The voices are high-quality and emotive, supporting many languages and voice options.

Speechify is useful for people who’re on the go. It allows them to listen to a report or document while commuting. Below are some of its key features:

• Supports Chrome and mobile apps: Listen to text from web pages, PDFs, or documents on iOS, on Android, or via a Chrome extension.
• High-quality voice options: Choose from different human-like AI voices across multiple languages.
• OCR and scanning: Take a photo of printed text or upload an image, and Speechify’s optical character recognition reads it aloud.
• API access: Developers can integrate Speechify’s TTS via an API.

Best for: Busy business owners and employees who read while commuting or multitasking. Speechify makes any text (articles, emails, PDFs) audible, improving accessibility for visually impaired team members and increasing productivity for multitaskers.

6. ChatGPT

ChatGPT is a conversational AI assistant powered by OpenAI’s large language models, currently GPT-4. You can ask questions, have it summarize documents, generate code or marketing copy, brainstorm ideas, and more.

The AI chatbot remembers your preferences based on the custom instructions you provided in previous chats. Additionally, paid users can gain access to improved models that offer more comprehensive research and analysis capabilities.

Below are some key features of ChatGPT:

• Memory and instructions: In the Plus or Pro tiers, ChatGPT can recall past conversations and user preferences to provide personalized responses. However, there is a considerable difference in the pricing of the Plus and Pro plans.
• GPT-4o-level outputs: You have access to an advanced AI GPT-4o bot for high-quality text generation, translations, and even image analysis.
• Versatility: Professionals use AI tools for drafting emails, writing code, answering customer queries, or planning content.

Best for: This is one of the best AI tools for small business, not to mention the most popular. Business owners and employees who need on-demand AI assistance. It assists customers with a variety of tasks, making it easy for anyone without technical skills.

7. Grammarly

Grammarly is an AI-powered writing assistant that catches grammar errors and improves style in real time. It works in browsers and writing apps such as Microsoft Word, Slack, and Gmail.

Grammarly includes a sophisticated tone detector, flagging whether your message sounds friendly, formal, confident, etc. The platform offers AI writing suggestions that allow you to rephrase a sentence or paragraph with a click. It makes your writing more precise and concise.

Check out the key features of Grammarly below:

• Tone detector: Instantly shows the tone of your draft and suggests adjustments.
• Generative writing suggestions: Offers one-click rephrasing for clarity/impact and AI-driven draft generation from prompts.
• Grammar and spell check: Captures mistakes across 500,000+ sites and documents.
• Browser and app integrations: Includes plugins for Chrome/Word/Outlook to ensure you write error-free everywhere.

Best for: Anyone who writes emails, proposals, or content. Small teams utilize it to ensure professional, error-free communication. Its AI coach also helps less-confident writers sharpen their style over time.

8. Clari

Clari is a revenue operations platform for sales teams, using AI to improve pipeline management and forecasting. It analyzes your entire sales pipeline to identify risks and opportunities. Clari’s predictive AI models can identify which deals are likely to close and which are at risk.

The platform also inspects activities to score lead engagement. Overall, it acts like a “forecaster on call,” giving reps real-time insights on deal health and recommended actions.

Below are some of the key features of Clari:

• Pipeline inspection: Highlights stuck or at-risk deals and pinpoints root causes.
• AI-driven forecast modeling: Improves accuracy by analyzing historical trends.
• Activity scoring: Rates each opportunity based on engagement signals like emails and meetings to focus efforts.
• Deal and coaching dashboards: Gives a visual pipeline view and alerts for sales managers.

Best for: Small sales teams with complex, multitouch sales cycles. It brings enterprise-grade AI to forecasting so even a small team can forecast and close deals with the confidence of a big enterprise.

9. Notion AI

Notion AI is built into the Notion workspace to assist with writing and knowledge management. It summarizes documents, brainstorms ideas, and answers questions using your workspace content and general world knowledge through GPT-4. For instance, you can ask Notion AI to read a PDF sales report and “suggest three things we should do,” and it will return a concise summary with action suggestions.

Notion also connects to Slack, Google Drive, and other services, so asking it a query like “When was our last product release date?” will gather answers from integrated sources.

Below are some key features of Notion AI:

• Summarization and ideation: Condenses long notes or documents into bullet summaries and generates creative ideas.
• AI answers across your data: Searches your Slack channels or Google Docs within Notion AI to get up-to-date answers.
• Meeting note generation: Auto-summarizes meetings and captures key decisions.
• Multimodal analysis: Analyzes images and suggests design improvements from a photo or code snippets.

Best for: Remote-first teams and knowledge workers who document everything. Notion AI helps everyone find answers and insights in their own Notion pages without manual searching. It turns Notion into a personal knowledge assistant.

10. Reply.io

Reply.io is an AI-powered sales outreach platform that automates personalized prospecting. It helps small sales teams send cold emails, follow-ups, and LinkedIn messages at scale while still sounding custom. The core is Jason AI, an AI assistant that uses a lead’s information, such as industry, job title, and interests, to create email sequences.

Below are some key features of Reply.io:

• AI-generated sequences: Creates customized email content for each contact on the fly, ensuring emails feel hand-written.
• Lead intent detection: Flags leads that engage (e.g., open/click) so reps can follow up on hot leads.
• Multichannel outreach: Automates outreach with email, LinkedIn, calls, SMS, and even personalized voice messages. Reply has built-in LinkedIn integration, auto-connect/messaging features, and a dialer for making calls/SMS messages.
• Sequence analytics: Tracks open and reply rates and optimizes your outreach playbooks.

Best for: Small sales teams or agencies doing cold outreach. Reply.io’s AI personalization triples reply rates, and its multichannel reach lets you contact prospects on email and LinkedIn without manual effort.

11. Otter.ai

Otter.ai allows professionals to transcribe, summarize, and document conversations in real time. It works on Zoom, Teams, Google Meet, or in-person via its mobile app. Rather than frantically taking notes, team members get to focus on the discussion.

Below are some key features that make professionals more efficient:

• Live transcription: Captures spoken dialogue and creates a searchable transcript as the meeting happens.
• Automated summaries and action items: Condenses the conversation into a summary after the meeting and automatically captures and assigns action items from your discussion.
• Collaboration: Shares transcripts with your team, highlights important parts, and tags speakers for clarity. The tool can identify speakers automatically.
• Mobile and desktop recording: Records voice notes on the go with Otter’s iOS/Android app or Chrome extension.

Best for: Small teams that hold frequent meetings, interviews, or brainstorming sessions. With Otter, everyone stays engaged instead of scribbling notes, and afterward, the searchable transcripts ensure no detail is lost.

12. ElevenLabs

ElevenLabs offers AI voice generation. It produces ultra-realistic, human-like voiceovers from text, which is helpful in recording videos, podcasts, customer phone systems, and training modules.

The quality is so high that it even captures emotional nuances like excitement and calm. Check out some of its features:

• Hyper-realistic text-to-speech: Conveys emotion and emphasis just like real speakers. ElevenLabs’ voices are reviewed as some of the most realistic AI voices on the market.
• Multilingual support: Includes an AI dubbing studio that can translate and reproduce audio in many languages while preserving voice identity.
• Voice cloning: Replicates voices based on samples you upload.
• Developer API: Allows you to integrate ElevenLabs into your apps or workflows via a powerful API for scalable voice generation.

Best for: Businesses creating audio content without hiring voice actors. ElevenLabs is ideal for producing quick, branded voiceovers. SMBs can generate professional-sounding explainer videos or IVR phone prompts in minutes.

Nextiva’s AI Tools Help You Crush Your Small Business Operations

AI tools help automate repetitive tasks that can consume your focus. Since these tasks are essential, too, AI ensures they are executed in a way that doesn’t hamper your focus but rather brings you contentment. AI takes care of them while you concentrate on critical daily operations that demand your attention.

This way, your productivity increases, and you get to create more output while leveraging the same amount of time. It enables you to streamline your operations while still achieving your business goals — or possibly even overachieving.

Since communication is a fundamental element in a business, among these tools, Nextiva’s AI and service channels stand out. Nextiva enables you to deliver an experience that customers have with big corporations at a lower cost. The ROI shoots up, along with your customers’ satisfaction.

Let Nextiva take care of CX while other tools optimize your operations toward better efficiency.