Technology & Innovation

How to use AI in your business to save time

Use AI to automate repetitive business tasks, improve workflows, and support decisions. This frees your team to focus on customers, strategy, creativity, and sustainable growth initiatives.

Published 5 August, 202612 min read Share

Every business owner could use a bit of extra support, and using Artificial Intelligence (AI) is an impactful and effective way to get it. 

AI can help you and your staff spend less time on repetitive tasks and more time on work that supports customers, employees, and growth. 

However, getting useful results depends on choosing the right tasks, protecting sensitive information, and checking that the technology is genuinely saving time.

To get the best outcomes, start by learning practical ways to use AI in business, best practices for introducing it, and how to make the most of the time it frees up. 

Key takeaways

• AI can save businesses time by automating repetitive tasks such as creating content, analysing data, managing customer enquiries, organising workflows, and supporting administrative work.  
• Start small by introducing AI to one low-risk, time-consuming task before expanding its use across your business.  
• Give AI clear instructions, protect sensitive business data, and always review AI-generated outputs for accuracy, bias, and legal compliance.  
• Measure whether AI is genuinely saving time by comparing the quality, cost, and efficiency of a process before and after implementation.  
• Use the time AI saves to focus on higher-value work, such as strengthening customer relationships, supporting employees, solving complex problems, and planning for business growth. 

Here’s what we cover:

How to save time with AI tools

AI tools can save businesses time by helping to complete a wide range of everyday tasks faster, from creating content and analysing data to managing customer enquiries and administrative work. 

What makes AI so effective is not only its speed but also the wide range of business tasks it can support. Here are some examples of how AI can help you get work done faster: 

Creating marketing content 

No matter what kind of business you’re running, you’ll need content. 

From website copy and product descriptions to social media posts, newsletters, and emails, content is an essential part of cementing your brand, marketing your products or services, and communicating with customers. 

Generating regular content that’s consistent and reflects your brand’s tone of voice can take up a lot of time. But with the right prompts, an AI tool can instantly create content for any number of scenarios. 

If you’ve got a sale coming up, for example, you can ask an AI tool such as Claude or Scribe to write a series of social posts to let customers know about the event. 

You can even instruct the tool to use a certain tone, add hashtags, emojis, and links, or even write jokes. Add in any relevant details that you’d like included and you can produce a month’s worth of social content in seconds. For example: 

“Write 10 tweets promoting an upcoming 40% off sale event for a company that specialises in vegan, sustainable running shoes. Include a call to action and [LINK] in each one.” 

You can also use generative AI tools to repurpose content by instructing it to summarise a long report in a series of social posts, for instance, or transcribe a meeting and turn it into a blog post for a specific audience. 

And if you need eye-catching images to accompany your social posts, image generation models like DALL-E can help create them.

Generating and following up on sales leads 

Finding potential customers and keeping track of sales conversations can take up a significant amount of time. AI tools can help speed up this process by identifying promising leads, organising prospect information, and supporting timely follow-up. 

For example, AI can analyse information in your customer relationship management system to: 

• Highlight leads that are most likely to convert.
• Summarise previous emails, calls, and meetings.
• Show where each prospect is in the sales process.
• Suggest the most appropriate next action. 

It can also help personalise outreach by using information about a prospect’s business, interests, or previous interactions. Those details are important when drafting: 

• Tailored introductory messages. 
• Follow-up emails. 
• Responses to sales enquiries. 
• Communications for different stages of the sales process. 

This gives sales teams a useful starting point without requiring them to write every message from scratch. 

After a call or meeting, AI can summarise the discussion, identify agreed actions, and suggest when to follow up. Some tools can also update customer records automatically, reducing the amount of manual administration involved in keeping sales information accurate.

Providing customer service 

Customers today expect any issues they have to be addressed quickly, and using AI can help you get them the answers they need instantly. 

AI-powered chatbots can provide quick and efficient assistance to customers through a chat interface, handling queries, offering product advice, and helping them find information about business policies. 

When you have AI dealing with customer enquiries, many customers will find what they’re looking for without any kind of human intervention. 

This can significantly reduce the amount of time you spend on taking calls, replying to emails, and answering (often the same) questions. 

By integrating a generative AI model into your website or apps, you can create bespoke customer chatbots for your business. 

Using a large language model like the one ChatGPT is built on, you can feed information about your business into the model so your AI customer service assistant can build its knowledge and offer relevant, accurate responses to customer questions.

Carrying out market research 

A big part of staying competitive as a business is knowing what’s going on in your market. 

Carrying out regular research into things that affect your business, such as product trends, customer needs, and competitor performance, helps you adapt quickly to an ever-changing landscape.  

However, doing this essential research takes time. You need to pull data from a huge number of different sources, analyse it for patterns and movements, and compile it into a coherent structure. That’s no easy feat when you’ve got so many other pressing tasks on your to-do list. 

An AI tool can pull together this information for you in seconds. 

With their ability to scour the internet for relevant information and present it in a digestible format, AI-powered tools can identify competitors and analyse their activity, such as product launches, marketing campaigns, pricing strategies, and customer feedback. 

AI can also help you develop buyer personas to help you understand your target market and guide your marketing strategies, or they can generate insightful Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analyses that can help you make data-driven decisions. 

Again, the key to generating useful results that save you time is to get specific and be clear with what you want the AI tool to create, like so: 

“Perform a SWOT analysis for an independent bookshop business operating in the UK.” 

Some AI tools allow you to go even deeper, providing predictive analysis and forecasts based on relevant data from across your organisation. 

Offering suggestions based on external market trends and your own business performance, these tools can empower you to make informed, proactive decisions, optimise your resource allocation, and get ahead of market shifts. 

Managing schedules and workflows 

Coordinating meetings, assigning tasks, and keeping work moving can involve a lot of manual organisation. AI tools can reduce this administrative burden by helping businesses manage schedules, priorities, and routine workflow updates. 

For example, AI can: 

• Compare calendars and suggest suitable meeting times. 
• Allow customers to book available appointments automatically.
• Turn meeting notes into actions, owners, and deadlines. 
• Assign or route tasks to the appropriate person or team. 
• Send reminders when work is due or overdue. 
• Identify bottlenecks, dependencies, or competing priorities. 
• Update project-management systems, calendars, or customer records automatically. 

This can reduce the time spent sending emails, checking availability, and manually transferring information between systems. It also helps teams keep track of responsibilities and follow-up actions without relying on memory or scattered notes. 

Supporting recruitment and employee administration

Recruiting employees and managing routine HR administration can involve a significant amount of repetitive work. AI tools can help businesses complete these tasks more efficiently while giving managers and HR teams more time to support candidates and employees directly. 

For example, AI can help you: 

• Draft job descriptions and recruitment advertisements. 
• Summarise applications and organise candidate information.
• Schedule interviews and send reminders to candidates. 
• Prepare interview questions based on the requirements of a role.
• Answer routine questions about workplace policies or employee benefits.
• Create onboarding materials, training plans, and internal communications.
• Summarise employee feedback and identify recurring themes. 

AI may help organise information and prepare initial drafts, but it should not make recruitment or employment decisions without human oversight. Review its outputs carefully for accuracy and potential bias, particularly when comparing candidates or analysing employee information. 

Analysing business data

Your business data can provide you with incredibly useful insights, like what your most profitable products are, how your cash flow is looking, and how much stock you’ll need on hand at various times of the year. 

Parsing through the massive quantities of data that your business generates every day, however, is a major undertaking—and one that needs to be carried out regularly to get the most value from it. 

It’s a time-consuming task for even the most spreadsheet-savvy of entrepreneurs. 

But luckily, AI can analyse huge amounts of complex business data and create accessible, actionable reports immediately. 

To generate these business-specific reports, AI tools need access to relevant business data. For example, to create a financial performance report, the tool would need to be given information such as income statements, balance sheets, and expense breakdowns. 

However, it’s important to be aware of the risks associated with feeding this kind of proprietary data into public tools like ChatGPT. 

Using an AI tool that’s built into your business software, such as Sage Copilot or Salesforce’s Einstein, can help you analyse your data safely and save you even more time. 

These types of AI assistants are baked into the applications you use to run your business, meaning they have automatic access to data, and they’re able to use this additional context to provide in-depth analysis based on your entire business, identifying patterns and surfacing insights you might not otherwise have spotted.

Best practices for using AI in your business 

The best approach to using AI in business is to introduce it gradually, give it clear tasks, make sure to protect your sensitive data, and always review its output before using it. 

Following these practical principles can help your business save time while maintaining quality, security, and cost control. 

Start with a small, manageable task 

Choose one repetitive, low-risk activity that currently takes up unnecessary time, such as summarising meeting notes, drafting routine emails, or categorising customer enquiries. 

Testing AI on a limited task makes it easier to identify problems, refine the process, and decide whether the tool delivers enough value before using it more widely. 

Use business-grade accounts and tools 

Free AI tools can be useful for experimentation, but paid or business-focused accounts can offer stronger privacy controls, additional administrative features, and integrations with the software your business already uses. 

Before entering business information into any AI tool, check how the provider stores, processes, and uses your data. Avoid sharing confidential company, employee, or customer information through tools that have not been approved for that purpose. 

Give AI clear instructions 

The quality of an AI-generated result depends heavily on the information and direction you provide. Explain the task, intended audience, required format, and any important context or limitations. 

Providing examples can also help the tool produce results that better reflect your preferred style, terminology, or business processes. 

Check for accuracy, bias, and legal risks 

AI tools can generate inaccurate, incomplete, or unsuitable information, and their outputs may reflect bias in the data used to train or operate them. 

Review AI-generated work for factual accuracy, relevance, tone, and consistency before using it in customer communications, reports, or business decisions. Take particular care when using AI for recruitment, employee management, credit decisions, or customer profiling, where biased outputs could lead to unfair or inappropriate outcomes. 

You should also check that your use of AI complies with relevant data protection, employment, and intellectual property requirements. AI can provide a useful starting point, but people should remain responsible for approving important work and deciding how the information is used. 

Measure whether AI is saving time 

Do not assume that introducing an AI tool automatically improves a process. Compare the time, cost, and quality involved before and after implementation. 

You could track: 

• How long the task takes to complete. 
• How much manual work is still required.
• Whether errors or revisions have increased.
• Whether employees and customers are satisfied with the result. 
• Whether the cost of the tool is justified by the time or resources saved. 

If a tool creates additional checking or correction work, refine how it is being used or consider whether a different solution would be more appropriate. 

What to do with the time AI saves

 By reducing repetitive administration and routine manual tasks, AI can give business owners and employees more capacity for work that requires creativity, judgement, and personal attention. 

That could mean spending more time: 

• Building stronger relationships with customers. 
• Developing new products or improving existing services.
• Solving complex problems that require human expertise.
• Planning for growth and responding to changes in the market.
• Supporting and developing employees. 
• Making informed strategic decisions. 

AI can also help create a more manageable workload. Instead of using every hour saved to take on more tasks, businesses can give people greater flexibility, reduce pressure during busy periods, and support a healthier work-life balance. 

The aim is not to remove people from the way a business operates. It is to reduce the time they spend on repetitive work so they can focus on the activities where their knowledge, creativity, and relationships provide the most value. 

Frequently asked questions about using AI

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