British SMEs are ambitious but often struggle with resources and budget for things as simple as creating their online presence or hiring a lawyer.

RedShift Research revealed that over 50 percent of British micro businesses (five employees or less) don’t have a website. It’s hard for most tech savvy entrepreneurs to comprehend that half of the UK’s smallest companies aren’t accessing a larger digital audience or even to better serve their local clientele.

In fact, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) cites the lack of online presence as one of the top three reasons for startups and small businesses to fail.

The question is why, in this day and age, is there still such a big barrier to create an online business? It’s clear that a lot of these small businesses lack the time to develop a website themselves or inadequate budget to afford a web designer to do it for them, not to mention the design and content creation skills.

Perhaps they still think that a digital presence requires coding skills or even struggle with the confidence to launch their businesses onto a potentially global playing field.

This is where we believe that the introduction of AI tools will make a difference. With Wix ADI, building a website is like opening a Snapchat or Instagram account. While AI may be more commonly associated with robotics, when applied to digital data and design, it becomes exciting and the benefits are very obvious and impactful for huge numbers of customers.

Websites are most likely the first point of contact for potential customers. The fact that ADI can help businesses easily and quickly create websites with a professional look and feel will certainly contribute to market brands, raise trust, and provide an optimal user experience, leading to higher a percentage of conversions from visitors to customers as well as increase of sales.

The growing number of artificial intelligence tools can help entrepreneurs and small businesses easily perform fairly complex tasks; from website design to programing or even content writing. By the end of this decade, AI will be part of SME everyday life.

Here are some other AI tools that SMEs could consider to support them on their daily tasks:

LegalRobot helps businesses understand legal language. Once you take a picture of a legal document such as a contract, the machine goes through thousands of other legal documents to analyse it and help you understand your current one or write a better one.

Chatfuel is a platform that builds bots for your business. It allows anyone with no programming skills to create their chatbots. Its features include: Hundreds of integrations (Youtube, Instagram, Twitter, etc), analytics, content collections, auto-posting and many more.

The bot can even reply to customers on your Facebook page. Chatfuel hosts your bots and the service is free, which is useful for small businesses.

Conversica is an AI-powered marketing assistant tool that reaches out to your leads and engages them in a conversation. Once the lead is hot, it alerts the sales representative that it’s time to get in touch. This helps businesses identify and contact new customers so you don’t miss out on any emails, and spend less time on chasing down leads and more time focusing on selling.

Gluru acts like a personal assistant to keep a watch on your calendar and tracks meetings and events. It gives businesses a daily digest of your deadlines and appointments so you can stay on top of your to-do list.

Gluru connects these data points and your email and calendar for meetings, bringing related files to your screen before your appointment begins.

It’s crucial for small businesses to get to know some of the AI tools out there as they revel great business opportunities. I am excited to see the innovation in this space and particularly for business applications. The positive effect this technology will have on growth potential and working efficiency will be immeasurable.