You already know AI isn’t just a flashy tech trend—it’s becoming part of the everyday rhythm of running a business. The real question now is where it can give you more time: helping you respond to customers, shape your marketing, organize the work behind the scenes, and spend less energy on tasks that keep pulling you away from the work only you can do.

A July report from Ondeck Trends found that 61% of small businesses use AI, with 91% of AI users saying it has helped their business.

The biggest shift is from simply asking AI to write a social-media caption to using it as a copilot for recurring work. That can mean drafting first-pass emails, turning meeting notes into action lists, creating customer-service reply templates, summarizing documents, or helping brainstorm seasonal promotions.

For most businesses, the opportunity is not “replace people with AI.” It is: What task takes too much time, happens repeatedly, and still needs a human’s final judgment?

Three useful ways to start

• Marketing: Turn one customer question into a week of content—an email, three social posts, a short video script, and FAQ copy for your website.
• Operations: Ask AI to turn a rough process into a checklist, such as new-client onboarding, event setup, estimate follow-up, or inventory ordering.
• Customer communication: Create a bank of friendly, on-brand reply templates for common inquiries, then personalize and review them before sending.

Try this prompt:

“Act as a marketing assistant for a [type of business] in [city]. Based on this customer question—‘[paste question]’—write a helpful 150-word email, three Facebook posts, and five FAQ ideas. Use a warm, local, trustworthy tone. Do not make claims that cannot be verified.”

The caution worth keeping

Do not paste confidential customer data, employee information, passwords, financial records, or private business strategy into a public AI tool. Review facts, numbers, legal language, pricing, and anything customer-facing before using it.

This also matters because regulators are scrutinizing misleading AI claims. In March, the FTC announced a settlement that would bar Air AI and its owners from marketing business opportunities after alleging deceptive claims about business growth, earnings potential, and refunds. The lesson: be skeptical of any product promising fully automated sales, guaranteed revenue, or “set it and forget it” growth.

This month’s AI challenge

Pick one task that takes 20–30 minutes each week. Use AI to create a first draft or checklist, then measure whether it saves time without lowering quality.

Good first experiments:

• Drafting a monthly customer email
• Creating networking-event follow-up messages
• Turning testimonials into marketing ideas
• Building a simple FAQ list
• Summarizing notes from a team meeting

AI works best when you stay in charge: give it context, ask for a draft, check the result, and make it sound like you.

As you explore AI, keep the human side of your business at the center. At LBI, we believe local businesses create far more than transactions—they stitch together community, memory, meaning, and the everyday relationships that make a place feel like home.

Think of AI as a helpful assistant, not a substitute for the part of your business people remember most: you. Let it help, then bring your own judgment, personality, and care to the final interaction. Because H2H—human to human—is still where trust is built, loyalty grows, and local businesses shine.