As a business owner, you have two choices – embrace AI and leverage the benefits or resist change and risk falling behind your competitors.

Indeed, AI is here to stay and the technology is advancing rapidly. Every day, developers are creating new tools that can streamline the way your business runs and increase productivity.

What’s more, knowing how to use AI effectively could free up more of your time to focus on important human-centred tasks such as leading and inspiring your team and creating a vision for the business.

Here are five AI hacks you could use to save time, effort and money.

1. Get AI to proofread your communications

Any client-facing communications need to give the right impression of your business. You will already have considered the tone and content, but accuracy and style are also important.

If your communications (such as emails or social media posts) contain spelling errors or bad grammar, this could reflect poorly on you. It suggests little attention to detail and a lack of care. Although it may seem like a small issue, clients might be reluctant to give you their business if you can’t get the basics right.

Fortunately, AI tools such as Grammarly can proofread and check everything for you in seconds. You can even add an extension to your web browser to ensure all communications with clients are professional and polished.

2. Quickly generate professional images and graphics

You might need images and graphics for many reasons, whether it’s for marketing materials, your website, or presenting information in internal reports.

Sourcing stock images or manually creating graphics is time-consuming and sometimes expensive. However, you can quickly generate anything you need using AI tools such as Canva.

Using image-generating tools means you and your team can easily create professional-quality imagery without as much cost or effort.

3. Manage your social media easily

Social media is an essential marketing tool for most businesses, but it involves a lot of time and effort. You need to generate ideas and write posts, then create schedules across several platforms. It’s also important to respond to comments and engage with users too.

There are many AI tools that allow you to automate various parts of your social media marketing, so you can maintain a strong online presence without the time commitment.

Useful applications include:

• FeedHive for generating content ideas and creating posts
• Canva for generating images and graphics for social media
• Hootsuite for creating post schedules and analysing data, so you can optimise your strategy.

Bear in mind that you still need to take an active approach to your social media and engage with your audience on a human level. Nevertheless, AI can streamline much of the time-consuming administrative work involved.

4. Take notes and create action points in meetings

Meetings can be a time sink for businesses if they’re not managed effectively. It’s important to ensure you have an agenda and leave the meeting with clear action points to follow up on afterwards.

AI software such as Fathom can help you achieve this. This extension will record and automatically take accurate notes during video meetings and create a list of action points discussed. You’ll also have a clear transcript of the meeting in case you need to refer back to it.

Using these tools means you can focus on running the meeting and generating ideas, rather than taking notes and managing the agenda (or paying an administrator to do the same).

5. Condense complex information into a digestible format

Whether you’re reading financial reports or reviewing customer feedback, poring through large amounts of information takes up a lot of your valuable time. It can also be difficult to pick out the key points when you have a lot of data to review.

AI can do a lot of that work for you. Applications such as Google’s NotebookLM can take information and condense it into digestible formats including mind-maps or even an AI-generated podcast you can listen to.

This means you can focus on reviewing insights and taking action, rather than manually combing through information to pick out the crucial details and patterns.

Understand the limitations of AI and retain the human elements of your business

These are all ways you could use AI to reduce time spent on administrative tasks, but it’s important to understand its limitations. Crucially, you don’t want AI to replace the human elements of your business.

For example, you might use AI to help you proofread emails you send to clients, but you should still take the time to write those communications yourself instead of using tools like ChatGPT.

Finding this balance means you can retain the unique character of your business and provide excellent service to your customers, while also improving productivity.

Get in touch

While AI can manage many administrative tasks, there are some things that still require a human touch, including your financial plan.

Email us at clients@iqf.ie, or call 353 71 915 5560 to create a bespoke plan.

Please note

This article is for information only. It does not constitute advice.

It describes financial planning services that iQ Financial can offer to you. Financial planning services are not regulated by the Central Bank of Ireland.