Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the way businesses operate. And while it might seem like something beyond your startup's means, AI is quickly becoming more and more accessible for companies of any size.

Embracing AI can play a big part in helping your startup to succeed. How? Well, one of the main benefits of AI for startups is that it can automate certain time and resource-intensive processes. By automating these processes, you'll save both time and money, making it easier to accelerate your company's growth.

In this article we'll outline how AI can be used across your business to help your startup succeed, with recommended tools to help you get started.

First of all, let's take a look at exactly why startups need AI:

• To stay competitive

The startup world is a competitive place, and only 80% of startups survive their first year. To stay competitive, especially when you're up against larger enterprises in your field of work, it's important to scale fast, and AI can certainly help with that.

• To save money

Thanks to AI's ability to automate repetitive tasks, you'll be able to reduce the number of employees you hire and the amount of work you outsource.

• To keep your employees engaged

A happy workforce is a productive workforce, and by taking away certain monotonous tasks from their workload, you'll free up your team's time to focus on the more exciting and rewarding parts of their job.

AI can help to automate tasks across all areas of your business, from analytics and marketing to customer services and recruitment. Here's how!

One of the best use cases of AI for startups is within the field of data analysis. Collecting and analyzing data can be both taxing and tedious, and many startups simply don't have the time or resources to get it done, despite how useful the insights can be.

AI can help to automate data input and analysis, saving you from having to hire analysts while giving you access to important insights - from customer behavior to competitor analysis.

• Google Analytics - Google Analytics has its very own set of AI features that analyze your website data and provide insights on major changes or opportunities you should be aware of, such as if a certain landing page is performing better or worse than normal.

• Hotjar - Hotjar is a behavioral analytics tool that provides valuable insights into how users interact with your website. By tracking mouse movements and clicks, you can identify problems with your user journey and use these learnings to improve customer experience and increase conversion rates.

• Crayon - Crayon is a competitive intelligence platform that tracks your competitor's data from a range of sources, helping you stay on top of everything from pricing updates and marketing to team changes and more! It provides you with actionable insights to ensure you stay ahead of the game.

Marketing plays a pivotal role in your startup's success, but like data analysis, it can fall by the wayside when resource is scarce. Startups can use AI to help with their marketing efforts, from carrying out user testing to targeting specific customers with automated emails.

AI can even help with creating marketing content from scratch, saving you from having to hire a full team of marketing specialists.

• Hubspot - HubSpot is a CRM platform that helps you to automate your marketing efforts across email, ads, live chat, and more. It helps you with everything from simple routine tasks like email automation, right through to complex, multi-channel campaigns, with the aim of helping you to attract the right audience and convert more visitors into customers.

• VWO - VWO is an A/B testing tool that helps startups to conduct user testing, gather insights, and analyze the results. It makes experimentation easy, and there's even an AI copy generator to help you create and test variations.

• Jasper - Jasper is an AI content generator that helps you to create original written content, at scale, whether that's for blog posts, social media ads, press releases, or any other type of marketing content.

Whether you can afford a human assistant or not, AI virtual assistant services are super beneficial for startups. These services help you with a wide range of administrative tasks that would otherwise be time-consuming, or worse, forgotten about.

Scheduling, meeting notes, timesheets, billing, and payroll are just a handful of areas that virtual assistants can help with.

• Calendly - Calendly is an AI-powered scheduling platform that integrates with your calendar and makes it easy to book meetings, getting rid of that endless back and forth as you try to find a suitable time. It even goes a step further by sending reminder emails and follow-ups, freeing up your time to work on more important tasks.

• Transcribe - Transcribe is an AI-powered transcription tool that automatically generates meeting notes for you. Simply upload your audio or video recording, and in minutes you'll get a clear and accurate written transcription that you can edit, search, save, and share as required.

• Grammarly - Grammarly is an AI writing tool that reviews your writing and helps you with your spelling, grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure, correcting mistakes and offering suggestions to improve what you've written.

As a startup, chances are you can't justify having a customer support team on hand 24/7. Not to mention a sales and marketing team! That's where AI comes in. AI-powered chatbots help startups to communicate with customers at various stages of their journey - whether it's answering their queries or sharing useful marketing content at an opportune moment.

By harnessing the power of a chatbot, startups can engage web visitors, qualify interest, and increase the chances of converting web visitors into customers!

• Drift - Drift provides startups with an AI-powered live chat service that you can use to engage and assist website visitors. Arrange for specific messages to pop up on different pages to increase your chances of converting them into customers. You can quickly qualify customer interest, share useful content, and even schedule meetings with your sales team.

The recruitment process is an important one, especially when you're scaling your startup and needing to hire fast. When you haven't got enough time to network and recruit new talent, AI can do its fair share of the legwork.

It can streamline the process, optimize your job posts, help you screen and qualify candidates, and help with interview scheduling too.

• Manatal - Manatal is an AI recruitment tool designed to help you source and hire candidates faster. It simplifies the entire hiring process by suggesting the best candidates for the job and automating the process of filtering and scoring candidates' profiles.

• Textio - Textio is a tool that's designed to help you recruit a more diverse range of people. It does so by analyzing your job listings to identify any hidden social bias in the language used - including gender, age, and ability bias. It then suggests improvements to help you expand your talent pool. Textio helps you to quickly optimize job posts and any associated emails and content, saving you time while improving how you hire.

So there you have it, the full lowdown on AI for startups. Once you've started to harness the power of AI, you'll never look back!

Want to learn more about how you can use AI to your advantage? Check out our list of the best tools to boost productivity.

Written By Katie Garrett