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For designers, creatives, entrepreneurs, and content creators who want to level up their careers and creative businesses. Hosted by Philip VanDusen, Brand Consultant and founder of BONFIRE, this show explores personal branding, content creation, freelancing, and creative career growth.
Philip and his guests deliver practical coaching, strategies, and inspiration to help you market your work, attract new clients, grow your influence, and build long-term success. Covering personal branding, content creation, freelancing, digital marketing, and creative entrepreneurship, every episode is designed to support your growth as a creative professional in the Creative Economy.
10 Ways Small Business Can Use AI Now - and Why It Matters
Philip VanDusen
Brand Design Masters Podcast EP163
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Philip VanDusen:
AI has moved past the hype stage. We’re no longer talking about what might be possible someday. We’re talking about tools that small businesses, startups, and creative teams are already using to compete with companies that have ten times the resources. But here’s the important part. AI is not a strategy. It is a multiplier. And if you don’t already have clarity around your brand, your messaging, and your goals, AI will not fix that. It will just help you move faster in the wrong direction.
So what I want to do today is walk you through 10 real opportunities for using AI the right way, especially if you’re a founder, a small business owner, or a creative professional supporting clients. Along the way, I’ll also point out where human judgment still matters most, because that’s where your real value lives.
1. Enhanced Personalization
One of the most powerful uses of AI is delivering more relevant messages to the right people at the right time. Not creepy personalization, but useful personalization. AI allows brands to tailor emails, website content, and offers based on actual customer behavior instead of assumptions. What people click on, what they ignore, what they buy, and what they abandon.
Tools like Klaviyo and HubSpot allow even very small ecommerce brands to send segmented campaigns automatically, and now AI can help generate copywriting variations that match each audience. The important thing to understand is that AI does not decide what your brand sounds like. It only scales the direction you give it. That’s where creative professionals come in, defining voice, tone, and messaging frameworks so personalization still feels human - and most importantly: on-brand.
2. Increased Efficiency
The fastest win most small businesses see with AI is efficiency. AI is incredibly good at handling repetitive, low-leverage tasks that drain time and energy. Like first drafts of copy, ad variations, content outlines, basic research, and performance summaries can all be handled faster with AI support.
Tools like ChatGPT, Gemini and Jasper are already being used by solopreneurs, founders and small teams to move past the blank page and get momentum quickly. The key shift here is understanding that AI is not replacing thinking. It is replacing friction. Your job, or your client’s job, becomes editing, refining, and deciding what actually deserves to exist. If you're just taking what AI spits out, and using it as-is, you aren't doing yourself any favors. You're just contributing to the AI slop that is clogging the digital world right now. The brands that ultimately win will be the ones that edit, refine and make what AI spits out truly human, and authentic in your brand's tone-of-voice.
3. Scalability
AI makes it possible to scale output without scaling headcount. That matters a lot for growing brands. A company that used to publish one blog post or one video per month can now produce consistent, multi-channel content without burning out the team.
With tools like Notion using built-in AI, or Descript for content repurposing, one core content format (preferably long-form video) can be transformed into blogs, podcasts, emails, carousels, social posts, and short-form videos. For creative professionals, this shifts your value from producing individual assets to helping your design and execute repeatable content systems for your clients that will scale content QUALITY, not just volume.
4. Data-Driven Insights
A lot of small businesses rarely even look at their analytics - apart from sales figures or basic web traffic. And the businesses that DO look at their analytics data rarely use it effectively. A lot of times this happens because businesses don't know how to read that data, or what to do with it. This is where AI can be hugely beneficial. AI helps surface insights without requiring advanced analytics skills. Platforms like Google Analytics which used to be really hard to parse for the casual user (myself included), now can highlight trends, anomalies, and behavior patterns automatically, helping you understand what's working and what's not in (almost) real time.
This matters because it allows business decisions and creative decisions to be supported by evidence. Instead of guessing which message resonates or which campaign performs better, AI-supported insights make it easier to refine strategy and campaigns continuously and fluidly. Your business decisions - and also your creative, branding and design decisions - become more confident when they're informed by actionable feedback.
5. Creative Augmentation
This is where fear of using AI tends to show up, but it shouldn’t. AI does not replace creativity. It accelerates, and broadens, exploration. Designers and writers are using AI to generate ideas faster, explore directions they might not have considered, and get unstuck when momentum stalls or the 'ideas well' dries up.
Tools like Canva now offer AI-assisted layout suggestions, resizing, and image generation that help teams move faster without lowering standards. The difference between good and bad use of AI here is the direction it's given - or the edits that are made post-initial-output. AI can produce options, but humans decide what aligns with the brand and what doesn't.
6. Cost Reduction
AI also reduces costs on tasks that used to require outsourcing or significant time investment - which drives up costs. Transcription, basic editing of creative, audio or video versioning, content formatting, and early-stage drafts can all be handled in greater volume without it costing more to do.
Just one example of AI-driven Saas that reduce costs is Otter.ai which uses AI to convert spoken words from meetings, lectures, interviews, and other audio/video into searchable, written notes in real-time. It identifies different speakers, offers automated summaries, generates action items. It also includes an AI Chat feature that will answer questions about your transcripts, making it a comprehensive meeting assistant for productivity and knowledge management. This is the kind of work that would usually take a dedicated VA (and of course a VA's salary!) to do.
7. 24/7 Customer Interaction
Customer expectations have changed. People expect fast responses, even from small brands. AI-powered chat tools, and chatbot agents, make this possible without staffing a full support team. Platforms like Intercom and Tidio allow businesses to handle common questions instantly while escalating more complex issues to humans.
The risk here is brand damage if automation feels cold or confusing. That is why brand-voice matters deeply in AI automated interactions. Creatives play a critical role in shaping how these conversations sound and feel by working with clients be be sure that standards for brand personality and brand tone-of-voice are established and rolled out to marketing areas so that they know how to execute them in real-life use cases.
8. Trend Prediction
AI can identify patterns in search behavior, content performance, and social engagement faster than humans can. Tools like Exploding Topics use data analysis to identify emerging topics, trends, and markets before they become mainstream This can help businesses and creators gain a competitive edge. It works by monitoring web searches, conversations, and shopping data and spots patterns of rapid growth. This can help companies exploit emerging opportunities in areas like tech, e-commerce, and content creation much faster, and more accurately, than they have in the past.
This is especially valuable for startups and creative-led brands that rely on relevance and timing to stand out. Trend awareness becomes proactive instead of reactive.
9. Global Reach
AI-powered language translation has made global expansion accessible to smaller brands. Tools like DeepL can enable super-fast, high-quality translation of marketing content. But it's important to remember translation alone is not true 'localization'. Cultural nuance still matters. That's where humans still need to be involved - to make sure those translations are culturally appropriate and sensitive.
For instance, you can't just translate a marketing message into the Spanish language, publish it and call it a day. Why? That's because while Spanish is the official language of more than 20 countries, each has its own distinct culture, dialects, and traditions. Marketers have to understand this complexity, because a single "Hispanic" culture or language basically does not exist.
That being said, this creates opportunity for creatives – especially those who have personal experience with a particular culture – to help brands adapt messaging so it resonates across markets, not just reads correctly.
OK, here's'The One Tactic' I promised at the beginning that will change Everything for you!
10. AI as a Brand Memory System
This is the thing almost no small businesses are doing yet. Most brands treat AI like a tool they prompt once and then forget. The real power comes when you treat AI as a persistent brand memory system.
Instead of asking AI to write something from scratch every time, you feed it your brand strategy, your positioning, your audience definitions, your brand voice principles, your past campaigns, and even examples of what you like and dislike. Then, over time, AI can become a consistent collaborator that understands your brand's complexity and context.
This means every email, ad, caption, and idea will start from the same strategic foundation. For creative professionals, this is a massive opportunity! You can build and maintain these brand knowledge systems for clients, ensuring consistency while dramatically increasing speed and output. This is where AI stops being a novelty and will become true business infrastructure.
> This is how you have to think about it: AI is not about replacing people. It is about reallocating effort. Execution gets faster, yes, but human judgment, evaluation and editing becomes more important and valuable. Brand strategy also becomes MORE important, not less. The brands that win will not be the ones using the MOST AI. The winners will be the ones who are using it with clarity, consistency, restraint, and intention.
I know that's it's easy to hate on AI, I hear it all the time in my communities. But, if you're a creative professional, your role isn't to fight these tools. Instead you should lead their use thoughtfully. That's where your value will continue to grow in your profession. AI isn't going to take your job if you make it your job to learn how to use it - and how to implement it for your clients, in your particular area of expertise, whether that's marketing, design, photography, copywriting, audio or video, consumer insights - the list goes on.
So...that's it, stay creative and I'll see you in the next one.