Best Business AI Tools – DreamHost

No lofty technology prediction has proven truer than engineer and VC investor Marc Andreessen’s 2011 prophecy that software would eat the world.

Now, in some form of hyper-shortened circle of life, artificial intelligence (AI) is here to gobble up our current understanding of that world-eating software and switch how we use technology on its head.

AI isn’t just reserved for generating those overly-fashionable, blurry-fingered pictures of the Pope anymore — there are very real skilled applications.

In reality, the 2022 IBM Global AI Adoption Index found that a big majority of today’s businesses are either considering or already using AI of their day-to-day operations.

Whatever your level of experience with or understanding of artificial intelligence, it’s time for business owners and operators to think about all of the ways wherein AI may help with business performance.

Try this and more with this guide to all things business AI, including:

• The ins and outs of AI tooling
• What it’s that makes AI tools so precious for businesses
• Challenges to contemplate on the subject of adopting AI
• 19 of the highest AI tools for enhancing content creation, customer experience, marketing, sales, and way more

What Are AI Tools?

Within the scheme of things, AI is a somewhat broad term that describes a machine’s capability for performing actions which might be typically ascribed to human intelligence — Actions like reasoning, learning, generalizing, inferring, and convalescing at all the above over time.

Inside the field of artificial intelligence exist many subsets that you’ll have heard of, equivalent to machine learning (ML), natural language processing (NLP), large language models (LLMs), deep learning, neural networks, and more.

The business software tools we’ll list below all employ a number of of those AI methods to do things like automate processes and recognize patterns, which might make your enterprise more impactful when pursuing personalization, creative endeavors, and even constructing out recent technology.

Why Put money into AI Tools?

So AI tooling sounds reasonably interesting — but what are the actual business advantages of embedding smart recent software into your well-oiled workflows?

First, AI offers a strong solution for labor and skills shortages by applying automation that takes repetitive, easy tasks off worker plates. Nearly a 3rd of IT folks report staff saving time because of AI implementation.

And, greater than half of IT professionals in the identical study said that applying AI improved their very own IT processes in addition to network performance.

Apart from improving internal business efficiencies, 48% of participants reported seeing higher external experiences for patrons as well. In reality, near 40% of the larger corporations surveyed were using AI to spice up customer support agent efficiency, streamline discovering information/answers to commonly-asked questions, and create more customized consumer experiences.

With effectiveness increased across the board, it’s no wonder that 54% of organizations reported cost savings as one in every of the leading advantages of using AI to automate IT, business, and network processes.

Challenges When it Involves AI Platforms

Alongside some great benefits of AI, It’s also necessary to concentrate on the pitfalls you might encounter.

The proven fact that humans can inadvertently construct our biases into software is well documented. As such, one in every of the most important challenges of working with AI is avoiding bias — which IBM found a shocking 74% of companies admit they’re not working to scale back.

Then, there are the sometimes laughable and sometimes scarily subtle mistakes that AI-powered software will generate when attempting to create original content. Some professionals in the sphere will call these deviations “hallucinations” and even “delusions.” If a user doesn’t know to look out for these falsities, they’ll easily publish misinformation, pursue ill-fitting leads, push undesired experiences on customers, and base necessary business decisions on bad data.

With each the advantages and a couple of cautionary notes in mind, it’s time to get to know all of the ways wherein you possibly can roll mind-blowing AI tools into elements of your enterprise.

19 Best AI Tools to Upgrade Your Business (Across 9 Categories)

This list will guide you thru several categories where AI tooling may help digital business owners and managers apply intelligence and automation to enhance personalization, productivity, accuracy, creativity, and beyond.

Written Content

Let’s dive right in with the subject of the hour: generative AI.

Generative AI falls under machine learning. Tools on this category create recent, original content based on the information sets they’re trained on.

The generative AI software we highlight on this section focuses on producing and optimizing quality written content for sales and marketing purposes.

ChatGPT

OpenAI created what’s probably essentially the most well-known AI tool on the planet straight away: ChatGPT.

GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformers, an idea also introduced by OpenAI that provides ChatGPT its recognizable human-like tone. Behind the scenes, ChatGPT’s open API lets developers tap into its power, which is why it’s the engine behind so many content-generation tools today.

Simply give ChatGPT a request, query, or prompt and watch it immediately interact in a conversational manner. Content creators have used this AI writing tool to generate blog ideas, outlines, and first drafts; reply to emails; and even craft sales outreach messaging for various channels based on basic details about leads.

Pricing: On the time of writing, GPT-3.5 is free via the online or mobile app (you do need to sign up). Or, for essentially the most powerful and accurate version currently available, access GPT-4 via a $20/month subscription to ChatGPT Plus.

Acrolinx

Acrolinx is enterprise-focused content governance software that ensures you aren’t creating just any content but consistent, quality content that moves the needle in marketing and customer support while still maintaining great user experiences regarding in-product content.

Why concentrate on generating quality content reasonably than quick content? Because in case you want your content to point out up where most individuals devour it daily — that’s on Google — then it needs to satisfy the search engine’s ever-growing quality assurance standards.

One standout feature is AI Enrich for Acrolinx, a language model that Acrolinx users can train with their very own content. This makes for content that’s already accurate, top quality, and prepared for SEO (learn more about search engine marketing here) right out of the gate.

Pricing: You’ll need to contact the Acrolinx team for package information and pricing.

Video and Image Generation

With none artistic training, it could be difficult to develop ideas for (after which actually create) graphics that help draw readers to your quality content. So, let’s see some applications that can help round out your content.

DALL-E

DALL-E, also from OpenAI, is a tool that immediately spins up original graphics based on text input. It’s also possible to upload graphics you have already got and ask the tool to create different versions of them.

Some of the interesting things about input-based AI generation tools like DALL-E and ChatGPT is how much the output can vary based in your wording and level of detail. For instance, “photorealistic image of a bunch of individuals” vs. “abstract painting of a bunch of individuals” will get you two very different AI images that work in very different contexts.

We discover it most helpful to make use of DALL-E and similar tools to present us ideas on visualize concepts we are able to only describe. It’s also useful for putting a brand new spin on an existing graphic to make it unique — especially while you end up creating numerous content on similar topics and the creativity well is running dry.

Pricing: The present version, DALL-E 2, is out there via the online when you enroll, and usage is predicated on a credit system – 115 credits for $15.

Stable Diffusion

Stable Diffusion is a text-to-image tool from StabilityAI. It really works very similarly to DALL-E, where you input text to generate graphics. Stable Diffusion focuses on privacy, the liberty to create any form of AI art you would like, and providing open-source technology that helps democratize and diversify the world of AI.

Additional features include the Prompt Generator to aid you provide you with requests that make your results higher, ControlNet to can annotate graphics to assist the software create much more accurate output, and Visual ChatGPT that connects ChatGPT with other AI models so you need to use it to create graphics.

Pricing: All of Stable Diffusion’s features are currently free to make use of and available via their website — No signup needed!

InVideo 

Creating video content can definitely be daunting, however the AI video platform InVideo encompasses a text-to-video capability to aid you turn those YouTube and podcast scripts into animated clips very quickly. You possibly can type in prompts or import an already-written article to get the video generator began—layer in audio by recording a voiceover or using InVideo’s text-to-speech feature.

If you happen to aren’t already using video to have interaction social media followers, get your unique brand voice across, or offer shoppers a deeper look into your offerings — InVideo’s video editing is an awesome place to start.

Pricing: Try InVideo without cost, or enroll for a vast plan for $30/month when billed annually.

Design

Admit it, you’ve definitely wasted days with free online design tools, attempting to string together boilerplate resources to create brand materials and even designs in your website or app that look custom. We all know we’ve got.

It’s time all of us saved a while with AI design tools that can aid you provide you with custom, creative, and on-brand design assets.

Looka 

With Looka, all of it starts at the emblem.

Input your organization name, industry, brand colours, and styles you want, and let its AI program generate personalized, high-resolution logo options. Then, plug your recent logo into Looka’s Brand Kit to design marketing materials, including business cards, clothing, social media templates, and more that each one use your recent signature font, colours, and styling.

Pricing: Looka’s pricing is tough to search out, we only stumbled across it while attempting to download a test logo we made. The fundamental logo package starts at $20 for a single, low-resolution file. A Brand Kit subscription will run $96/yr. For $192/yr, you possibly can access Brand Kit in addition to an AI-generated website.

Uizard

Uizard applies AI to assist users create design mockups from text prompts, scans of hand-drawn wireframes, and even screenshots of other apps or web sites. The ultimate product is a clickable prototype you could use to check drive the client experience and even send to other stakeholders to present everyone an actual feel for the ultimate product.

What we love about Uizard is the way it bridges the gap between designers and developers and business owners who may not know communicate what they need to see from their app, website, or landing page. Just scribble it out on paper, and the team on the opposite end can use Uizard to construct a practical start line from which to collaborate.

Pricing: Signup is required, then you need to use Uizard without cost for 2 projects and ten free templates per 30 days. Currently, pro and business plans run $12/creator/month and $39/creator/month annually, respectively. Custom enterprise pricing can be available.

App Constructing

Now that we’re stepping into the swing of AI tooling, let’s go a step beyond designing the look and layout of our digital properties. Here’s how on a regular basis business folks can apply some ingenious software to construct the apps of their dreams.

Mendix

Mendix is a platform that brings together machine learning, Web of Things (IoT) technology, and other artificial intelligence tooling to assist users create mobile and web applications via a drag-and-drop user interface, templates, and pre-built components.

Because of their enterprise focus, Mendix apps are built to scale, handle complex features, integrate with practically every tool in your tech stack, and work across any channel.

Plus, with AI-powered process automation, built-in project management, collaborative digital workspaces, and a few of the strongest security within the low-code app-building game — Mendix is a great fit for contemporary distributed teams and growing businesses that have already got or may soon require complex solutions down the road.

Remember that since Mendix is a low-code platform and never a no-code one, some interaction with code is required. Extensive documentation, demonstrations, a community of users and contributors, and a training academy will help anyone willing to do somewhat learning to spin up a strong platform.

Pricing: It’s free to enroll and check out Mendix. After that, packages start at $60/month, and a custom, premium tier can be available.

Glide

Glide takes a singular approach to helping businesses construct mobile and web apps. Simply upload your spreadsheets into the app’s backend, and it would robotically create a basic app using your real data. Then, dive in and make the most of pre-built templates and components to pull and drop all of the mandatory features into place.

With the OpenAI integration, you possibly can add functionality to your app that can empower users to dig into the information and documents to search out buried information in seconds. This makes Glide a super fit for creating internal tooling, like a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, field sales application, customer support ticket tracker, worker directory, and so forth.

Pricing: Starting with Glide is free, and business plans go for $249/month. Contact the corporate for details on an enterprise package.

Customer Experience

In an age of digitally-native competitors, online interactions, and fast-growing inflation — customer experience often beats out offerings and pricing as one in every of the last true ways to distinguish your brand.

If you happen to’re able to create some mind-blowing customer interactions, try the next outside-the-box solutions.

Tidio

Chatbots, digital programs that converse with humans via text, provide a possibility to deal with customer concerns and catch shopper attention at the proper moment — without having your support team on call across the clock.

Tidio is a chatbot platform that goes a step further by applying AI. This tech offers personalized discounts and unique services or products recommendations based on what it has learned about each consumer from their chat content, purchases, browsing and search history, and on-site behavior.

Integrate Tidio along with your marketing platforms and add it anywhere your customers interact — your website, Facebook Messenger, etc. — to create a customized end-to-end experience that makes customers happier and support teams more productive.

Pricing: Join and start with Tidio without cost, then pay as much as $29/month for the AI chatbot package or $394/month for Tidio+. Tidio also offers bundles, add-ons, and personalized plans.

Poplar.Studio

Imagine how much happier buyers could be with products – and the way much you could cut down on support and return costs – if they might visualize them in real life.

That’s what Poplar.Studio offers by helping e-commerce businesses create 3D and augmented reality (AR) content that allows shoppers to “try” items on their home turf. Moreover, you possibly can apply that very same AI technology to construct creative marketing campaigns that immerse consumers in an experience and construct awareness and a following around your offerings.

Due to complexity of making AR and 3D content, we thought it best to recommend more of an agency as a substitute of a standalone tool in your first foray into constructing truly interactive customer experiences.

Pricing: Pricing appears to be done on a per-project basis. Contact Poplar.Studio or enroll and create a project temporary to get a greater idea of cost.

Hiring

Biases don’t just sneak their way into AI algorithms, bias can be a recognized problem within the hiring space.

Luckily, there are corporations on the market who’re using AI to not only make hiring teams more practical but in addition less biased at the identical time, increasing equity and balance across the workforce. Listed here are just a couple of.

HireVue
With the assistance of AI, HireVue’s platform automates the processes behind recruiting, interviewing, assessing, and hiring to make sure it’s “faster, fairer, and more flexible.”

Together with a commitment to security, scalability, and integrability with applicant tracking systems (ATSs) and calendars — HireVue’s most impressive feature in our eyes is the one which helps folks able of hiring make unbiased decisions.

With HireVue, you possibly can create scalable, structured interviews that ensure every candidate is asked the identical questions. Then, HireVue applies AI to create transcriptions and help analyze responses. This technique reduces instances of bias that may easily arise when interviewers are left to make up their very own questions and draw their conclusions off the cuff.

Pricing: Pricing is just not available on the HireVue website, but a demo may be requested.

Textio

Now we’ve got a recruiting tool that’s purpose-built to stop the biases that occur in business language — Textio.

Textio has created a cutting-edge system that uses AI to investigate workplace content. It highlights where possibly biased language is hiding, tells you the way it could impact certain readers, and offers suggestions to aid you higher nail the tone you’re going for.

The Textio platform was originally created to assist businesses get more inclusive of their recruiting content, however it’s since expanded to assist managers keep their language more equitable after the hiring process on the subject of performance management.

Pricing: We found once we went to request a demo that an annual Textio subscription starts at $15K, with discounts available in case you sign on for greater than a yr. In our experience, this pricing isn’t unusual within the hiring space. After all, at this price, this product could also be best for either large organizations or smaller ones making an enormous push toward hiring an awesome team.

Productivity

One among the hard truths of being a business owner or manager is that much of your day is spent in meetings. Don’t get me incorrect, there’s nothing incorrect with meetings so long as they serve a purpose, but when scheduled and handled traditionally, they do have a way of breaking up the flow of your day and sometimes create more work. That’s why we would like to call out the tools on this section that apply AI to make meetings more productive through smart scheduling and note management.

TimeHero

TimeHero goes beyond simply telling you the way long it took to do a task by applying AI to create a custom workday plan that helps you get more done.

Connect your calendars to robotically pull in meetings after which manually add tasks, projects, and due dates in natural language to have TimeHero create a schedule in real time that is smart in your habits and your life. Track your time using TimeHero, and it’ll even create timesheets that compare actual vs. estimated time — making it more accurate, and also you more productive, with every passing day.

Pricing: After a free trial, the annual basic plan is $4.60 per user, per 30 days. The premium package runs $22 per user, per 30 days. That’s pretty reasonable in comparison with the worth of time-tracking software that doesn’t even include any automation.

Fireflies.ai

How annoying is it to take notes while you’re attempting to listen in a gathering — and even worse, follow up on those notes afterward to work out what the heck everyone was attempting to say and what to do next?

In case your answer is “very annoying,” same.

Fireflies.ai felt that very same pain and got down to cure it with smart algorithms that record and transcribe meetings after which call out any motion items, pending questions, and necessary metrics.

Those self same notes may also be shared with other parties so as to add comments, pins, and reactions to eliminate unnecessary follow-up meetings.

Fireflies.ai includes CRM, communication, and task management platform integrations so you possibly can robotically amend records, create tickets, and keep all the proper folks within the conversation.

Pricing: Register to make use of Fireflies.ai without cost on a limited basis. Business plans run $19/seat/month, annually. Contact the corporate for enterprise membership.

Sales

Sales is one of the vital necessary places where owner-operators can spend their time and where business decision-makers should dedicate business resources.

That said, if those time and resources aren’t perfectly executed, at best, they’re wasted, and at worst, they’re directed toward the incorrect leads and actions — failing to convert and perhaps even scaring off high-probability prospects.

Put an end to mismanaged sales measures with the next AI sales software.

Gong

Gong connects with over 100 business tools to achieve visibility into customer behavior in every possible direction — clicks, calls, emails, and so forth. Using AI, the platform quickly processes these interactions to achieve context and develop insights. Armed with this information, go-to-market (GTM) teams can promptly concentrate on the highest-value leads with essentially the most personalized messaging possible to shut deals.

Go a step further to make use of the deep business and sales understanding gained from Gong to accurately forecast revenue and coach your sales team.

Pricing: Gong pricing is predicated on team size, sales strategy, and other aspects — so that you’ll need to contact them for pricing information.

Reply

Reply is an end-to-end sales engagement platform where you possibly can create a prospect list from its robust B2B database, robotically add meetings to your calendar, and interact Jason AI — an AI assistant that uses ChatGPT — to create cross-channel sequences and messages that guide leads through the sales funnel.

Pricing: For its sales engagement offering, you possibly can enroll without cost to Reply and revel in a fairly good set of features. The skilled plan ranges as much as $90/user/month, and a custom package can be available.

Digital Marketing

Last but definitely not least, we’ve got marketing, one in every of the ultimate categories where AI has the potential to make a huge effect by increasing worker productivity, messaging effectiveness, and business performance.

Anyword

Bringing things full circle, we’ve got one other content-focused generative AI tool. But, this time, it’s performance content.

Anyword focuses on using data and AI to quickly write copy for ads, emails, landing pages, and every little thing else marketing.

When you connect your website, social media, and other marketing channels to Anyword, the platform will mix your real-life stats with its data to supply thoughtful insights into what content performs the most effective. Proceed to coach the AI in your top content to assist it create much more conversion-ready copy.

Pricing: Anyword encompasses a free trial, starting at $39/ month when billed yearly. Request a demo to get info on custom pricing for high-volume usage.

Smartly.io

Okay, so that you’ve used the last tool to create tons of informed and impactful marketing messaging. Now, you only must get all of it on the market.

That is where Smartly.io is available in.

Use Smartly.io to publish and automate the management of all of your various marketing and promoting campaigns across leading platforms like Google Ads, Meta, TikTok, etc. Using this same singular source of truth, you may as well see all of your cross-channel performance data and continually optimize marketing execution.

Pricing: Join for a demo to get information on cost.

Will AI Tooling be Your Next Business Investment?

Despite the (very valid) concerns over accuracy and unwitting biases, artificial intelligence does offer numerous opportunities for businesses to unravel labor shortages, close skill gaps, increase IT performance, create more engaging customer experiences, increase customer support efficiency, and customarily cut costs across the board.

We’ve to say we’re excited to see where AI takes our world, and our businesses, in the approaching years. If you happen to’re also intrigued, stay tuned to the DreamHost blog where we’ll keep covering the AI news that impacts digital-focused corporations large and small.