By Expert Panel®, Forbes Councils Member
Lacking deep pockets, in-house expertise and expansive datasets, small and midsize businesses may believe they’re shut out of the AI revolution. However, AI isn’t out of reach for SMBs—in fact, it can provide an invaluable competitive edge. A growing range of accessible, low-cost AI tools can help even lean teams boost efficiency, uncover insights and improve the customer experience—without breaking the budget.
Below, members of Forbes Technology Council detail some specific, affordable ways smaller businesses can leverage AI to compete with larger companies. Read on to learn about practical AI applications that can power smarter, faster and more agile operations at any scale.
1. Tapping Into Broader Knowledge Bases
AI extends the reach of small teams, allowing SMBs to “go broad” by tapping into knowledge beyond their core as needed. Even small teams can access capabilities once reserved for larger organizations. Think of a one-person HR staff building training content, exploring new tech solutions without an in-house IT team, or a sales leader supplying a marketing asset without an in-house creative team. – Emily Lewis-Pinnell, Evaila
2. Transcribing Essential Conversations
Voice AI transcription services transform how SMBs handle meetings and customer calls. For the cost of a coffee subscription, tools like Otter.ai capture every conversation, making them searchable and actionable. SMBs can offer “recorded for quality” like big corporations but actually use the data. Sales calls become training materials, and client meetings become searchable records. – Marc Fischer, Dogtown Media LLC
3. Developing A Hyperlocal Presence
SMBs can use AI tools to automatically monitor, analyze and update local listings, reviews and keywords—helping them rank higher in “near me” searches. This hyperlocal presence drives foot traffic and online conversions without expensive SEO agencies, making it a smart, low-cost way to win visibility where larger players often overlook personalization. – Jagadish Gokavarapu, Wissen Infotech
4. Implementing Customer Service Chatbots
SMBs can use AI-powered chatbots trained on internal data for customer service, lead generation and FAQs. These highly cost-effective AI workers can automate responses, handle FAQs and qualify leads 24/7. This boosts efficiency, enhances customer experience and frees up staff—helping SMBs scale support and sales like larger companies, but at a fraction of the cost. – Henry Patishman, Regula
5. Automating Routine Tasks
SMBs can implement AI-powered automation to handle routine tasks like customer support, lead scoring or document processing. This allows smaller teams to increase efficiency, redirect human capital to strategic work and deliver enterprise-level performance without the enterprise-level cost. – Chris Brown, Intelygenz, a VASS Company
6. Scaling Data Management And Analysis
When working on a tight budget, it makes sense to use AI for what it does best, which is currently sifting through data and automating repetitive tasks. SMBs can utilize AI to scale data management and analysis, even without a huge team of in-house analysts. AI tools can help collect, parse, manage and retrieve insights from data, enabling smaller companies to compete with larger ones. – Julius Černiauskas, Oxylabs
7. Building Intelligent Workflows
SMBs can build a strong competitive advantage by automating business processes with no-code/low-code AI platforms. These tools enable intelligent workflows across IT, marketing, customer service and supply chain—boosting speed, efficiency and insight. This allows SMBs to compete effectively with larger players without massive budgets. – Stefan Gogoll, andagon Holding GmbH
8. Enhancing Niche Expertise
SMBs can leverage AI by combining affordable models like GPT with their niche expertise to offer differentiated solutions that stand out in the market. This fusion of deep domain knowledge and accessible AI enables SMBs to outperform larger firms that lack specialized insight, even with more tech resources. – Rodney Drake, VALID Systems
9. Automating Reporting
Use AI to automate routine reporting and data analysis. It is a low-effort way to reduce errors, save time and focus on real problem-solving. I have seen small teams gain visibility and uncover hidden inefficiencies just by automating reports. For smaller teams, that clarity is a game-changer. You don’t need a big team to get big results when automation’s doing the grunt work. – Bill Rokos, Parsec Automation
10. Analyzing Competitors
For competitive edge, build a bot to scrape and analyze your rivals’ reviews, find common complaints, and suggest product tweaks—it helps you fill market gaps fast. Train a small LLM to craft thank-you notes in your brand voice, then use tools like Calligrapher.ai to turn them into handwritten-style messages—it boosts loyalty at scale. – Priya Mohan, KPMG
11. Creating Personalized Email Marketing Campaigns
AI-driven email marketing tools enable SMBs to create personalized campaigns on a large scale. Small businesses gain a competitive edge through affordable tools that analyze customer behavior to deliver targeted content, which boosts both engagement and sales. – Saket Chaudhari, TriNet Inc.
12. Deepening Customer Relationships
One of the most significant expenditures for big enterprises is customer outreach. AI has set the stage for analyzing your existing customers and creating engaging marketing campaigns to target your niche audience. SMBs can leverage AI features from providers like GoDaddy.com, HubSpot and Mailchimp to deepen customer relationships on par with, or even better than, most enterprises. – Ashay Satav, eBay
13. Building Function-Based AI Agents
The concept of a “one person unicorn”—a startup valued at over $1 billion, run by one person—is gaining traction as AI becomes more capable. SMBs can benefit from the same capabilities that would enable a single person to leverage AI to handle all business functions. An affordable way to get started is to use a platform to build AI agents or multiagent systems for all possible business functions. – Michael Connell, Enthought
14. Minimizing Administrative Overhead
Automate your processes. This is pretty basic, but SMBs cannot afford to lose time to repetitive tasks and poor office productivity. Through agentic solutions like assistants and AI workflows, SMBs can drastically minimize administrative redundancy and overhead, saving them countless hours annually. – Daniel Keller, InFlux Technologies Limited (FLUX)
15. Generating High-Quality Content
SMBs can brilliantly compete by leveraging AI for hyper-efficient content creation. Affordable AI tools now generate high-quality marketing copy, social posts and even design ideas, democratizing compelling storytelling. This empowers lean SMB teams to amplify their brand voices and engage wider audiences effectively, leveling the playing field with larger competitors. – Anil Pantangi, Capgemini America Inc.
16. Analyzing Customer Feedback
One affordable and often underused AI strategy for SMBs is using AI to automatically analyze customer reviews and feedback across platforms. With minimal setup, AI can surface trends, flag pain points and suggest product or service improvements. This real-time voice-of-the-customer intelligence helps SMBs adapt faster than larger competitors and stay hyper-relevant. – Sandipan Biswas
17. Surfacing Key Insights
A practical and affordable way SMBs can stay competitive is by using AI to turn internal conversations into content gold. Record a sales call or support chat, then run it through free AI tools to pull out key insights, generate blog posts or create FAQ material. It’s a clever way to stretch resources—it’s like hiring a mini content team without the payroll. It just takes a bit of creativity and curiosity. – Umesh Kumar Sharma