If you haven’t already started integrating AI tools into your business, now is the time. We hear again and again at the moment that AI won’t replace humans but it will replace humans who don’t know how to use AI, and the only way to really know how to use it is to just start using it—having a play and learning to prompt. It’s opening up so many opportunities for small businesses and start-ups to be able to do things that they could never do before. It will create huge timesavers for you and help you grow to new revenue levels that you couldn’t otherwise achieve.
We talked to AI For Non-Techies founder Heather Murray for her tips and tools on how to use AI to grow your business in 2025.
What does 2025 hold for AI?
It’s not just about ChatGPT anymore; businesses are increasingly building out their AI teams and tool stacks. Think of AI assistants, using AI voice to make sales calls and arrange appointments, and creating AI videos, images, and avatars. 2025 will also see the rise of AI agents who work to a different level of complexity with little oversight from humans.
What can you do with AI in your business?
Build an AI team
You can build Custom GPTs or use Claude Projects to start to do tasks for you. You put in a set of instructions (like a long, more detailed prompt) and upload files that it can learn from. It will ask you questions back too and you can use it for things like helping you to create training programmes based on your onboarding call transcript, devise slide notes and slide design briefs for webinars, write blogs, email sequences, landing pages and lead magnets.
Create an AI tool stack
Heather splits her personal AI tool stack into four different areas and shares with us some of her favourite tools that she’s using right now. The AI tool stack areas are:
1. Personal Productivity
2. Business Operations
3. Client Services
4. AIaaS (AI as a Service)
If you’re new to AI, start by focusing on using it to help you with your personal productivity and go from there, moving on to areas like operations, sales, marketing and recruitment.
1. Personal Productivity
ChatGPT and Claude
Use ChatGPT and Claude as a creative partner, to bounce ideas off, for brainstorming and even as a therapist. Whenever you have a new task, ask if ChatGPT or Claude can help you out.
Cove
Cove is free and lets you create mind-map-style boards that are turbo-boosted with AI. It’s amazing for things like project management, event organisation, and planning a new service. It will visually map all the different sections out for you, asking you questions and creating schedules. And it has internet access to conduct the research.
Letterly
Letterly is a phone app that you can use while you walk and talk. Brain dump all your chaotic business ideas, and they will be turned into checklists and action plans.
Motion
Motion is your AI calendar where you can amalgamate your diaries and add tasks with descriptions and attachments. You can assign them to different people, give it a priority level, tell it how long it will take, when it’s due and pick a schedule for it and it will time block an available slot for you to do the task. If you don’t complete it, it will automatically move it to your next available slot.
Circleback
Everyone should have an AI notetaker to record videos and transcripts of their meetings. Circleback also gives you an overview, outcomes, next steps, and conversation starters to help build client relationships, and it’s searchable. If you’re feeling extra creepy, some notetakers (like Sybill) analyse body language, but this feels very invasive.
2. Business Operations
As well as using ChatGPT and Claude, enhancing your or team’s efficiency by using these tools:
Perplexity
Perplexity is great for research; think Google meets ChatGPT – a search engine powered by AI that breaks down your search into an amalgamated answer and lots of different categories. You can save searches, ask follow-up questions and it also gives citations so you can check the source and not fall for an AI ‘hallucination’ (AI can commonly just make up answers).
Midjourney
The best AI image generator.
Runway
Brilliant at turning images into video.
Humantic
Humantic is for sales and runs on LinkedIn, giving your prospects a personality assessment and then qualifying the lead and telling you if your personalities are compatible. It goes on to advise you on how best to cold call, write and email, negotiate, and close with the person.
HeyGen
Create an avatar that you can use for video. It’s a bit of a mindblowing concept that most people don’t realise you can do yet so there’s certainly a novelty value that you can stand out with but it’s likely to get boring quickly as it becomes overused and commonplace.
Canva
Canva has integrated AI really well with its Magic Studio to give us easy one-click tools like photo editing, where you can remove a background or change the colour of your jumper in a few seconds.
3. Client Services
Use AI tools to improve your existing service offerings.
Persana
Persana is all about prospect list building. We’re talking emails, phone numbers, whether they’re hiring, revenue, or company news, and you can even ask for a piece of information of your choice and populate a column in a spreadsheet with it.
AIaaS (AI as a Service)
Once you get to grips with AI, you can create new services that are purely AI-driven for clients, such as creating social media posts or custom GPTs to strategise marketing. It still needs human input to prompt and know what good looks like.
Businesses are using AI to automate and speed up their operations, sales, marketing, admin tasks and service offerings and if you don’t begin to use this technology soon and build your AI tool stack, then the business world is going to leave you behind faster than ever.
Thank you to Heather Murray for sharing her AI business tool stack and tips.
If you want to learn more about using AI for your business in a non-intimidating, accessible way, check out Heather Murray’s AI Academy, perfect for non-technical beginners.
