How to get started with AI for small and medium businesses

No longer just the subject of science fiction, artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

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Unlock your SMB’s potential

Explore AI’s key benefits and how it can help solve your most pressing challenges, before accessing practical implementation advice. Gain inspiration from stories of SMBs like yours that are already using this technology and find out how AWS can help you create a thoughtful, successful AI strategy.

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The transformative impact of AI

AI is levelling the playing field, giving SMBs the ability to compete with larger corporations. Discover how AI tools close the innovation gap and tackle challenges such as limited resources, scalability, and lack of expertise.

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Unleash AI’s benefits

Enhance customer experiences

Transform the customer journey with personalized recommendations and captivating experiences. From targeted marketing to tailored customer relationship management, SMBs can harness AI-driven insights to tune into audience’s evolving needs.

Improve content creation

AI can help SMBs quickly scale and strengthen digital marketing with relevant, readable, and brand-aligned content. Elevate customer engagement and streamline workflows—all without the need for large budgets or teams.

Boost productivity

Ramp up efficiency by automating time-consuming manual operations and processes. By eliminating human intervention, SMBs can free up their team to focus on driving growth and value-added tasks.

Preparing your SMB for AI

Three practical steps to getting started with AI today.

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Define a use case

The first and most important step, building a robust business case is key to successfully integrating AI into your SMB. Identifying a use case helps you clarify your intentions, establish a direction, and address specific challenges. A clear vision and defined goal are the foundation for implementation—they provide a reliable framework for measuring success and the basis for how you will use AI solutions to achieve those objectives. SMBs like yours are already doing this in a variety of ways, using AI for everything from content creation to image and video processing, as well as personalized marketing campaigns.

Read use cases on how SMB Innovate with AI

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Create your data strategy

SMBs with a strong data strategy are well-positioned to turn growing volumes of data to their advantage. A variety of data types and datasets can be used for AI—such as customer data, sales data, and operational data—with each offering unique insights. Map out the route to success with carefully curated system inputs, efficient data acquisition, high-performance data processing pipelines, and stringent data quality checks.

Learn more about how SMBs can develop a modern data strategy

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Identify the right tools and approach

AI implementation can be challenging with limited resources, but AWS’s ready-to-use building blocks enable SMBs to explore its potential without incurring outsized costs. Amazon’s AI Use Case Explorer can help you identify the right AI applications and AWS Marketplace offers pre-trained AI models for swift deployment. For those without extensive technical expertise, no-code and low-code services make it easier to integrate AI into workflows.

Explore ready-to-use AI solutions in AWS Marketplace