Most small businesses don’t need a research lab. They need fewer tabs, faster responses, and a better sense of what’s going on in the business day to day.
The right way to think about AI tools as a small business owner is to map them to the jobs you already do: triaging email, sending quotes, chasing invoices, updating spreadsheets, posting updates, and making sense of messy inputs from customers and vendors.
A good starting stack often looks like this: – A general-purpose assistant for writing and editing (emails, proposals, website copy). – A simple workflow inside your CRM or accounting tool that auto-drafts replies or summaries. – A basic analytics or reporting helper that can turn raw exports into something you actually read.
If a tool doesn’t make one of those jobs meaningfully faster or less painful within a week, it’s probably not worth keeping around — no matter how impressive the demo is.