What can AI actually do for a small business?
Lesson 1 of a free course: five everyday jobs AI chatbots do well in a small business or office, ready-made requests, what not to hand over and how to check.
AI-generated image: Internet of Things News / Google Gemini
After reading this article you will be able to:
- Name five jobs a chatbot can draft for a small business: emails, summaries, quotes, customer replies, spreadsheets
- Adapt a ready-made request to your own work, giving the AI the material it needs
- Keep legal, tax, medical and personal-data decisions with people, and check every answer before using it
On this page
AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini are most useful to a small business as fast writers and readers. Today they do five everyday jobs well: drafting and correcting emails, summarizing long documents, turning your notes into a quote or a product sheet, preparing draft replies to common customer questions, and giving you a first reading of a spreadsheet. In each case you supply the material, the AI writes a draft, and you check it before it reaches anyone. Decisions on law, tax and health stay with you and your advisers.
This is lesson 1 of “AI for small business: a free course”. Each lesson answers one question and ends with a short quiz.
This site is written with AI tools, including Claude by Anthropic. This page uses only what makers, public authorities and published studies say, with links.
Why start with these five jobs?
They are everyday office jobs, and two of them have been measured in published studies. In 2025, 17% of EU businesses with 10 to 49 employees used some form of AI, according to Eurostat. Among businesses that had considered AI but did not use it, the most common reason was a lack of expertise (70.89%), followed by unclear legal consequences and data protection worries. This lesson deals with the first reason; lesson 2 deals with the other two.
Two published studies measured what a chatbot changes in this kind of work:
- Writing. Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang of MIT gave writing tasks typical of their jobs to 453 college-educated professionals; half could use ChatGPT. In their study in Science (July 2023), the average time taken fell by 40% and the quality of the work rose by 18%. It was a short online experiment with one-off tasks, not a normal working week.
- Customer questions. Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond followed 5,179 customer support agents as they were given an AI assistant. Issues resolved per hour rose by 14% on average and by 34% for new and less skilled agents, with minimal change for the most experienced. The paper, published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 2025, studies one AI assistant introduced to support agents.
Neither study measured a small shop or office, and neither promises you a saving. They show where the help appears: routine writing and answers, more for people new to the task.
Which five jobs can you hand to a chatbot today?
Copy each request below, replace the parts in square brackets and remove names you do not need. Google’s prompting guide for Gemini suggests four ingredients for a good request: who you are, the task, the background and the format you want. A request like this is called a prompt.
1. Writing and correcting emails and texts
A plumber has to answer a customer who is upset about a late visit. Paste the customer’s message without the name, then ask:
I run a small plumbing business. Write a polite reply to the customer message below. Apologize for the delay, explain that the previous job took longer than planned, and offer two new time slots: [Tuesday 9:00] or [Wednesday 14:00]. Keep it under 120 words and do not offer a discount. Message: [paste]
The same works for correcting a newsletter or translating a reply. Ask for “shorter” or “warmer” until it sounds like you.
2. Summarizing long documents
A supplier sends new terms and conditions of 20 pages. Upload the file and ask:
Summarize this contract in plain English for a small business owner. List the payment terms, the price changes, the notice period for cancelling and any automatic renewal. For each point, quote the exact sentence and give the section number. If the document does not say something, write “not stated”.
Asking for exact quotes is one of the ways Anthropic’s guide to reducing errors recommends, because you can check each point against the original. The summary helps you read the contract; it does not tell you whether to sign it.
3. Turning notes into a quote or a product sheet
A painter writes notes during a site visit. Paste them and ask:
Turn these site-visit notes into a clear quote for the customer. Use a table with item, quantity, unit price and total. Use only the prices I give here: [interior wall paint 12 euros per square meter, ceiling 15 euros per square meter, labor 35 euros per hour]. If a price is missing, write [PRICE?] instead of guessing. Notes: [paste]
Without prices, the same idea turns a supplier’s technical sheet into a product description.
4. Drafting answers to frequent customer questions
A bed and breakfast receives the same ten questions every week. Paste your house rules and price list, then ask:
Using only the information below, write short, friendly answers to these questions: check-in time, parking, pets, breakfast hours, cancellation. If the information is not in the text, write “ask the owner”. Information: [paste]
Google’s guide gives a similar example: answering a customer “based on” the company’s FAQ document. Check the drafts again whenever your prices or rules change.
5. Getting a first reading of a spreadsheet
You export a year of sales from your till or accounting software. Delete the columns with customer names, upload the file and ask:
This file lists my sales for [2025]. Which five products brought in the most money? Which month had the lowest sales? Show the calculation or formula you used for each answer, and make a simple chart of sales by month.
Google’s guide lists a similar task for small business owners: finding the top five expense categories and the month with the highest cash outflow. The help pages of ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini describe uploading files: Claude’s and Gemini’s name spreadsheets (Claude needs a setting switched on for Excel files), ChatGPT’s lists file uploads and data analysis, and Copilot in Excel works inside the spreadsheet itself. Microsoft’s Copilot in Excel FAQ also warns that it “can sometimes make mistakes, misinterpret information, or produce inaccurate results”.
What should you not hand over to AI?
Decisions on law, tax and health. Microsoft’s FAQ for Copilot in Excel says to avoid using it “for decisions in sensitive areas such as finance, legal, or medical topics”. OpenAI’s terms of use say you should not rely on its answers “as a substitute for professional advice”. A chatbot can help you prepare the questions for your accountant, your lawyer or your doctor; the answer comes from them.
Personal data, unless the plan and the settings are right. Customer names, addresses, health details and staff records are personal data under EU law. On a personal account, chats may be kept and used to improve the AI unless you switch it off, and some may be read by staff: Google’s Gemini privacy page asks users not to enter “confidential information that you wouldn’t want a reviewer to see”. What happens to what you type gives the settings for each assistant, and lesson 2 explains what the privacy rules ask of a business.
The last word to a customer. Anything you send goes out in your name. Read every draft before it leaves.
Payments and actions on your accounts. Some AI tools can now click and type on websites for you, and they can make mistakes such as ordering the wrong thing. What is an AI agent? explains the risks and the settings that keep you in control.
How do you check what the AI gives you?
The AI writes text that sounds right whether or not it is. When it makes something up, the mistake is called a hallucination. The large language model behind every chatbot, the program that writes the answers, puts together likely words, and a likely answer is not always a true one. The European Commission’s questions and answers on AI literacy says that staff who use ChatGPT at work “should be informed about the specific risks, for example hallucination”.
Five habits drawn from the makers’ own guides:
- Give it the source. Paste the document, the price list or the rules, and say “use only this information”, as Anthropic’s guide suggests.
- Let it say “I don’t know”. Anthropic’s guide says that allowing the AI to admit uncertainty “can drastically reduce false information”.
- Ask for quotes and check them. Each point should come with the sentence it is based on.
- Check every name, number, date and price against the original. Google’s guide says to review the output “to ensure clarity, relevance, and accuracy” before using it.
- Recalculate one or two figures yourself when the AI works on a spreadsheet. Microsoft’s FAQ says to “review, edit, and verify anything Copilot creates before you rely on it”.
None of these habits removes errors completely. Anthropic writes that its techniques “don’t eliminate them entirely”.
Which assistant should you use for these jobs?
Any of the main chatbots can do all five. They differ in price, languages, the apps they work with and how they treat your data. AI assistants compared sets out plans and prices side by side, Which AI do I need? helps you choose by need, and lesson 3 covers business plans and their costs.
Where to go next
- Lesson 2: What rules apply when your business uses AI? covers the AI Act, privacy and professional secrecy, with a training log to copy.
- What happens to what you type explains where your chats go and how to change the settings.
- AI for everyone is the complete guide to today’s AI, from the start.
- Lesson 4: What can I ask AI in my line of work? gives ready-made requests for six kinds of business.
Quiz: check what you learned
Pick one answer for each question: you see at once whether it is right, and why. Your answers are not sent anywhere.
Common questions
How can a small business use AI?
The most common uses are writing and reading: drafting and correcting emails, summarizing long documents, turning notes into a quote, preparing draft answers to frequent customer questions and getting a first reading of a spreadsheet. In each case you give the AI the material, it writes a draft, and you check it before it reaches a customer.
Can AI answer my customers for me?
It can draft the answers, from your own price list, opening hours and policies. Read every draft before sending it: the AI may promise something your policy does not allow, and anything you send goes out in your name. A chatbot that replies to customers on its own, with nobody checking, is a much bigger step than drafting, with more that can go wrong.
Is it safe to put customer data into ChatGPT or another chatbot?
Be careful, especially on a personal account with the default settings. Google, for example, asks Gemini users not to enter confidential information they would not want a reviewer to see. Remove names, addresses and numbers before pasting, and read lesson 2 of this course on the privacy rules before putting customers' personal data into any AI service.
What is the best AI for a small business?
There is no single best one. ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini can all draft, summarize and read files; they differ in price, languages, the apps they work with and how they handle your data. AI assistants compared and Which AI do I need? help you choose by need.
Topics: AI for small business, AI course, work, prompts, ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini