5 Ways to Use AI in Your Business Today

Most AI guides are written for technical people. This one isn't. If you run a business and want to stop hearing about AI from everyone else and start actually using it, here are five things you can do right now.

1. First drafts for anything written

Proposals, emails, job descriptions, social posts, product descriptions, FAQs — anything that starts with a blank page. Give the AI your bullet points, your tone, and your audience. Get a first draft in 30 seconds. Edit it in 5 minutes instead of writing for an hour.

2. Customer query responses

Paste a customer email or message into Claude. Ask it to draft a professional, friendly response that resolves their issue. Even if you rewrite it entirely, having a draft to react to is far faster than starting from nothing. Many businesses find they only need to change a sentence or two.

3. Summarising documents and reports

Got a 40-page supplier contract? Paste it in and ask for a summary of the key terms, payment conditions, and any unusual clauses. Got a long email thread? Ask for a summary of the current situation and what needs to happen next. This alone saves hours per week.

4. Building internal knowledge bases

Describe how you do something in rough notes and ask the AI to turn it into a clean process document. Or paste in a messy process doc and ask it to rewrite it clearly. Over a few months this compounds into a genuine operations manual.

5. Generating ideas on demand

"Give me 20 ideas for blog posts for a Scottish construction company targeting SMEs." Or: "Suggest 10 ways we could reduce customer churn in a subscription business." Use the AI as a brainstorming partner — it won't always be right but it will get you unstuck.

The pattern across all of these

You're not replacing your judgement. You're eliminating the blank page and the first-draft slog. You stay in the loop; the AI handles the grunt work. That's the correct mental model for using AI in business right now.