AI Tools for SMEs - The 10 Best AI Tools for Every Small Business

Motion really surprised me because they actually deliver on the whole AI Agent hype. I tested Motion as part of the Productivity Tools Comparison and was slightly in love afterwards. They give you 7 AI employees for your small business, each with different strenghts to help you with various workflows and work alongside you autonomously. The agent hype didn't have much substance in my opinion, with Motion one of the few companies to deliver on its promise. For example I requested a monthly report of AI tools for one category, with clickable links to their websites, which Motion delivered on flawlessly. Come up with simple use cases and workflows first, and work your way up to the more complicated stuff and you'll never do manual annoying work anymore.

Artlist is a creative suite for all things video: Imagine a candyland for filmmakers and creators who love AI. This platform lets you access the newest and best models for video (I tested Veo3 through them first) and image generation (same with Nano Banana), AI voices and sound effects. Originally a plaform for a huge music and sound library, they clearly have pivoted towards AI, but of course still include their original offer in today's. Their stock-free library of video material is not the typical cringe footage, everything is super stylish. What I also really appreciate about Artlist is that they always pass on price drops on models and their credits immediately to their customers and the plan structure is modular: you only pay for what you need. It's hard to get such a good deal within one subscription elsewhere and once they have added their own editing suite (currently you can connect it to Davinci or Premiere Pro) they are unstoppable.

Granola is great for small business owners who have lots of meetings because it's basically your meeting assistant. This assistant doesn't just note down (transcribe) your meetings, but you can also ask it later via a chat window about its content or what you've agreed on without having to scroll through the whole conversation. This is much more efficient than the offer of most of the other note taking assistants and it works incredibly well. I love the clear dashboard and navigation and with $14 monthly for the business plan, it's a wise investment for outsourcing a bit of your brain.

I love tools that let me access various models from different companies within one platform. With LLMs constantly updating their capabilities, it's just nice to not have to decide on one only. Perplexity gives you this flexibility as it gives you access to all big players: ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and Gemini. If you prefer to give your data to Google and save money, today you can simply go with Gemini. But when I bought my perplexity pro subscription, the Gemini model was still very annoying, constantly stating that it didn't have answers for very simple questions. It has much improved ever since, but I still prefer Claude for copywriting and the Perplexity labs feature is incredibly helpful. I ask it for example to analyze my competitor pages and it will give me a full action plan for 3, 6 and 12 months with lots of valuable insights I wouldn't have gotten elsewhere (even much more in-depth than deepsearch could ever do).

If your business is an eCommerce store or your selling products in any other way, I recommend to create UGC content with HeyGen for social media or product videos. No other avatar generator can create such life-like human replicas as this platform. Plus, they regularly launch new products on their platform, putting them ahead of competitors. They just launched a motion graphics tool and I expect them to become a all-in-one video platform sometime in 2026, due to their fast pace (by the way, this is the race most video and image generator pages are in right now). Most avatars really seem like humans, just create a short test sequence to check the lip sync and movements of the avatar, match it with a good voice and scale up your UGC production.So, if you morally have no issue with using a fake influencer recommending your product, HeyGen is the right tool for you (I can almost hear the Asians laugh until here in Berlin).

Bonsai is the accounting software for freelancers, because they literally have built their tool for this audience. They have various AI-powered features that make SMEs life's easier like the invoice reminder, expense and budget tracker. I love their clean dashboard and recently they have added workflows, which help you keep track of everything client or project related.
I personally haven't tried their CRM products, but I heard good things about it.

You probably know Canva or have at least heard about it. I wouldn't rate the AI in canva as absolutely premium and it has it's stronger and weaker areas, but the sheer amount of features and use cases for Canva, make it the perfect tool for SMEs. Add the affordable on top of the arguments list and we've just tied the SME package for bargain hunters. What I don't like about Canva too much are the presentation and image generation capabilities. Both are very basic, almost disappointing for a design tool. I can't tell for sure, but I feel like the image generator is still based on Dall E 2. They have recently improved the video editing feature, adding multiply layers for a more precise editing. What I love are their numerous app integrations: Any type of effect, filter, crazy font styles, even AI avatars are collected here. And Canva's AI image editing is superb, the background remover is instant, magic extend or magic grab are tools I wouldn't want to miss anymore. So if you create a lot of content for social media, websites or ads, and you need more AI editing than generation features, Canva is absolutely worth testing.

Blackbox AI is a really helpful AI agent, which lets you choose from the best LLM models and also offers its own model Blackbox. It's credit based and the dashboard looks like ChatGPT. To test it I've given it three tasks with multiple steps, for example a keyword data entry, an affiliate partnership research task and an evalution task where it was supposed to categorise presentations. It solved the first two flawlessly, even found the Slidebean affiliate program which I didn't even find myself yet. But it struggled with evaluating the presentations in the last task, so I would stick to regular research types of tasks. The bigger challenge is finding enough of these where AI agents can help, but that's on you.

I'm not saying Adobe Express is the \*ish, it's rather that all tools are solid and their free plan is generous. With Adobe Express you can access a whole suite of free design and AI tools. What's special is that this offer includes two free video generations, which usually is nowhere else to be found because the tokens are quite expensive. The AI video editing suite is sufficient for beginners and small projects and it's nice to have all in one tool (image gen, video gen, editing suite, stock footage, fonts, overlays, templates and stickers). I just think the dashboard could be more intuitive, sometimes you have to go a bit in circles to find what you are looking for.