September 26, 2025
17 Ways To Automate Your Small Business
Just a few years ago, the benefits of AI and automation were only available to big businesses with budgets to match.
Not any more. Per research from the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) and Intuit, nine in 10 small business owners say someone at their organization currently uses AI tools. Of those, 62% report positive changes in productivity and 63% have seen an uptick in job satisfaction.
Source: ICIC 2024 survey of business owners
Late to the automation party? No problem. Read on to learn all about how to automate your small business across three key functions:
👉 Lead generation and management
👉 Customer support and engagement
👉 Office management and admin
Benefits of automation for small businesses 👍
AI and automation offer wide-ranging benefits for small businesses. By helping employees do more with less, automation opens the door to greater efficiency and productivity – as well as lowering costs by mitigating the need to maintain a large human team.
Increased efficiency
With automation, your employees spend less time on repetitive, labor-intensive tasks like…
👉 Data entry and analysis
👉 Booking and confirming appointments
👉 Sending and chasing up invoices
…and much more besides.
Higher productivity
In turn, these time savings allow your team to focus on higher-value activities, such as generating leads and serving customers. Plus there’s less chance of human error, resulting in even greater efficiency and productivity.
Reduced costs
Automation doesn’t just save you time. By driving efficiencies and boosting productivity, it also saves money – because you can accomplish more with a smaller headcount. All of which sets you up for sustainable business growth.
Top small business processes you should automate 🤖
Small businesses have found a ton of use cases for artificial intelligence and automation. Indeed, the above study from ICIC and Intuit shows that AI adopters use the technology for everything from analyzing data to producing marketing materials at scale to summarizing meetings and web content.
Source: ICIC 2024 survey of business owners
Broadly speaking, small businesses looking to leverage the benefits of automation for the first time should focus on three core areas – lead generation and management, customer support and engagement, and office management and admin.
Lead generation and management tasks
Generating leads is a key element of small business growth. Automating associated tasks – like lead scoring, call handling, and asking for customer referrals – helps you generate leads more efficiently. Which, in turn, makes it easier to scale your business.
Use AI call handling to capture leads
An estimated 62% of small business phone calls don’t get answered, of which 37.8% go to voicemail and 24.3% don’t get a response. That’s a big problem, because every missed call represents a potential lead who couldn’t get through to you.
That’s where AI-powered answering services like Rosie AI come in. Your Rosie AI agent saves you time and ensures you never miss a valuable lead by automatically capturing predefined information from callers – like their name, address, and the specific service they’re calling about.
Promote lead magnets
Lead magnets are a common small business lead generation tactic. The idea’s pretty simple:
👉 Step #1: Create a piece of high-value content
👉 Step #2: Build a landing page with a lead capture form
👉 Step #3: Automatically share your lead magnet with people who complete the form
That way, the potential customer gets something useful (like an ebook download or access to a webinar) and you get their name and contact details, so you can reach out to share details about your services and promotions.
Trouble is, plenty of small businesses lack the time and expertise to create their own lead magnets. But you can automate much of the manual work using AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude – just make sure to add value by including your own human insights.
Prioritize sales time with lead scoring
Lead scoring involves assigning individual leads a numerical value that speaks to their likelihood of becoming a paying customer. The higher the number, the hotter the opportunity – and the more you should prioritize them.
Handling this process manually can eat up a ton of time, especially if you generate high volumes of leads. So automate it based on common actions like subscribing to your newsletter, visiting your pricing page, or requesting a quote.
Ask existing customers for referrals
Referrals are worth their weight in gold, with research revealing that referred customers…
👉 Generate higher profit margins
👉 Show higher customer lifetime values
👉 Are more loyal
But even if an existing customer loves your service, they might need a little nudge to recommend you to their friends and family. Do this by sending automated referral emails to every customer – you could even sweeten the deal with an incentive, such as a discount on their next purchase.
Assign inbound leads to a sales rep
If you only have one person responsible for selling, they’ll naturally handle every lead that comes in. But if you have two or more salespeople, it makes sense to assign leads based on their specific strengths and knowledge. Use automation technology to assign new inbound leads to the best rep – then schedule an introductory call or trigger a welcome email from the rep’s account.
Customer support and engagement tasks
Sometimes, customer communications benefit from the human touch. But it makes sense to automate some customer engagement and support tasks, such as answering incoming calls, sending appointment reminders, and running satisfaction surveys.
Respond to contact form requests immediately
Got a contact form on your website? The faster you respond to those messages, the more professional – and eager – you’ll look. As a small business, you likely can’t afford to pay someone to answer contact form queries around the block. But you can use email automation to send instant replies explaining that the query has been passed on to your team and they’ll receive a follow-up response via call or email within a set period of time.
Never miss an incoming phone call
Small businesses often struggle to deal with high volumes of incoming calls – especially when those calls happen outside of regular office hours. Unfortunately, most callers won’t give you the benefit of the doubt. Instead, they’ll assume you’re just not interested in helping them.
That’s why smart small business owners use automated call handling services like Rosie AI, which frees up employees to focus on other essential activities by answering calls 24/7/365 – and even handling multiple calls simultaneously.
🤓 Learn more: How Much Does an Answering Service Cost?
Send automated appointment reminders
You’ve booked an appointment, but the potential customer never picked up the phone, answered their door, or showed up to your meeting. Frustrating, huh?
Missed appointments cost you time and money. While you can’t completely eliminate them, you can take steps to reduce no-shows by scheduling automated appointment confirmations and follow-ups via SMS and/or email.
Create new customer email sequences
Ensure your new customer relationships start off on the right foot by sending automated welcome sequences. The specifics will naturally vary based on your business type and the goals you’re trying to achieve. For example, a welcome sequence for an HVAC business might look like this:
📧 Email #1: Confirms the customer’s upcoming appointment, including date, time, and location/how you’ll get in touch.
📧 Email #2: Reminds the customer of their forthcoming appointment and shares anything they need to do ahead of time (like finding the warranty information for their HVAC system).
📧 Email #3: Follows up after the appointment by asking the customer for a review.
📧 Email #4: Thanks the customer for their review and asks them to refer friends and family.
Done manually, this is a bunch of work, and it’s easy to forget individual steps. But automating the process means you only have to create the sequence once.
Offer website support via chatbot
Sometimes, customers visiting your website will be looking for specific information, but won’t feel ready to speak to you on the phone. In that case, the smart move is to add an automated chatbot to your site to answer frequently asked questions and point customers toward relevant products and services. You might have noticed the chat feature on our website…
…and you can get your own using low-cost platforms like ChatBot and Fin AI.
Run customer satisfaction surveys
What’s the best way to find out what customers think about your business? That’s right – ask them.
Satisfaction surveys help you identify common grievances so you can (hopefully) put a stop to them. Again, you can use email automation software to send them automatically at key points in the customer lifecycle, such as after a recent purchase.
Create and schedule social media posts
For many small businesses, social media is a major source of brand awareness, website traffic, and leads. But there’s a problem – social media marketing can be a major time sink.
Fortunately, AI and automation can help. Lean on generative AI tools to come up with social media content ideas, write copy for posts, and create images and videos from scratch. Plus you can schedule posts in advance using automated social media management software.
Office management and admin tasks
On average, entrepreneurs spend a whopping 36% of their work weeks on administrative tasks like invoicing, data entry, and ordering office supplies. And that’s without factoring in all the time your employees spend on similar activities. Fortunately, a lot of admin work is super repeatable, which makes it a perfect candidate for automation.
Pay, send and chase up invoices
From paying suppliers to chasing up customers, invoicing is a major time sink for small businesses. But it doesn’t have to be like that, because much of this work can be handled by automation software. For example, automated invoice processing can handle data capture, validation, approvals, and payments – all with zero human involvement.
Schedule reminders for important tasks
Even tasks that can’t be fully automated can still be streamlined using automation software, such as setting automated reminders to ensure you don’t forget important tasks.
For instance, say you want to send every new customer a handwritten “thank you” note. In that case, you could create a reminder that automatically includes a new customer’s name and address. Plus the software can track the completion rate of these tasks.
Automate document management
Running a small business involves a ton of paperwork. But, once again, automation can do the hard yards for you. For instance, if you regularly onboard new freelancers, you can automatically ask them to share their W-9 form and schedule follow-up reminders in advance.
Handle job applications
Done manually, hiring new team members can be a labor-intensive process. That’s why many small businesses automate some of the recruiting process by using web forms to gather candidate information (like resumes and answers to preliminary interview questions). Which means you only spend time speaking to applicants when you’re confident they’re a good fit for the role.
Automate payroll processes
The payroll process involves various tasks, from calculating taxes to distributing payments and generating payslips. Because it’s so repeatable, much of this work can be automated, saving time for your team and reducing the risk of human error.
The bottom line ✍️
There are lots of ways to automate a small business. We chose 17 high-value actions in this article – but, in reality, this list could have been twice as long.
However, if you’re only going to focus on one type of automation, we strongly recommend AI answering services like Rosie AI. You’ll never miss another incoming call, plus you can train your AI agent to provide customized support using information like your Google Business profile, website information, and pricing documents.
But don’t just take our word for it. See for yourself by creating your free Rosie AI account – your first 25 minutes of call handling are on us!
FAQs
What does it mean to automate your business?
Automating your business means using automation software to handle repetitive tasks that would otherwise have to be performed manually. That way, human team members are free to concentrate on higher-value actions like generating leads and serving customers.
What is small business automation?
Small business automation involves automating labor-intensive, repetitive small business tasks like handling incoming calls, sending appointment reminders, and sharing invoices with customers. Effective automation helps small businesses to boost efficiency, increase productivity, and cut costs.
When should you not automate?
Not all tasks should be automated. Before deciding whether to automate a task, consider whether it requires human judgment – if it does, it’s probably best to leave it to your human employees, as errors can be costly. Generally speaking, it’s best to automate tasks that are highly repeatable, with little room for nuance.
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