Top 10 AI Tools Every UK Small Business Should Use in 2025

If you’re running a small business in the UK, that means you have to wear many hats – from managing finances to marketing and customer service.

Thankfully, 2025 offers a wealth of AI-powered tools, each more innovative than the last, to lighten the load of small business management. Below, we’ve compiled the top 10 AI tools for small businesses, promising a future of exciting possibilities.

For each, we outline what it does, key features, and who it’s best for. These tools are designed with user-friendliness in mind, ensuring that even those without technical expertise can easily navigate and utilize them.

1. ANNA Money (Finance & Admin assistant)

ANNA (which tellingly stands for “Absolutely No Nonsense Admin”) is an award-winning UK business account and financial admin app designed to take the headache out of bookkeeping. It’s like having a banking service and virtual finance assistant in one, built specifically for UK startups, sole traders, and limited companies.

🔸Main features:

• Business account with debit card, automated invoicing and expense tracking, and even tax calculation tools.
• ANNA’s AI helps sort your invoices and expenses automatically – it will create, send, and chase up invoices for you, and snap and sort receipts to categorise expenses.
• It also provides handy tax reminders so you never miss HMRC deadlines. All of this runs in the background to save you time.

🔸 Why it stands out for UK entrepreneurs:

• ANNA is uniquely tailored to UK needs, offering company registration, built-in admin, bookkeeping, payroll, and tax tools compliant with UK regulations.
• It recently won “Best Application of AI or ML in Financial Services” in 2023, highlighting its innovative use of AI to simplify small business finances.
• Users get 24/7 UK-based support, and ANNA even “miaows” when you use the card – reflecting its friendly, no-nonsense personality.

🔸 Who it’s best for:

UK small business owners who want an all-in-one financial management and admin solution, especially those without a dedicated accountant.

It’s great for time-strapped founders who need to manage company formation, financial management, invoicing, and taxes in one place.

2. ChatGPT (OpenAI) – AI assistant for content & ideas

Since its breakthrough release, ChatGPT has become the go-to AI tool for countless tasks in small businesses. It can answer questions, brainstorm ideas, draft writing, and even generate code using its powerful GPT-4 language model.

🔸 Main features:

• Advanced conversational Q&A – ask anything from “How do I calculate VAT for a sole trader?” to “Give me social media post ideas for a café” and get coherent answers. It can write and rewrite content (e.g. marketing copy, product descriptions, emails) in seconds.
• It handles tasks like summarising documents, translating text, creating lists and outlines, and even basic math or analysis.
• It’s also great for brainstorming names, slogans, or social media captions when you’re stuck. Essentially, it reduces “blank page syndrome” and provides instant insights or content.

🔸 Who it’s best for:

Any small business owner or team that needs help with written content, ideas, or information lookup. You don’t need technical skills, simply type questions or requests as you would to a colleague.

3. Canva (with Magic Studio) – AI design and visual content tool

Canva, the beloved graphic design platform for non-designers, is now supercharged with Canva AI (Magic Studio) features. Its AI acts like a design assistant that can whip up everything from social media graphics to presentations based on your prompts, making it a user-friendly choice for small business owners.

🔸 Main features:

• Magic Design: You can start with a simple written prompt or even upload your own photo, and Canva will automatically generate a selection of polished design layouts for you. This is great for quickly getting templates or ideas for flyers, ads, etc.
• Magic Write: An AI text generator built into Canva for coming up with copy (like captions or headlines).
• Magic Edit and Magic Eraser: These let you modify images easily – for example, you can select part of an image and ask the AI to replace it with something else, or remove a background object with a swipe
• AI image generation (Magic Media), where you describe an image and it creates one for you – useful for unique illustrations or product mockups.
• Magic Switch can instantly resize and reformat a design into different dimensions or even translate it into other languages.

🔸 Who it’s best for:

Virtually any small business in need of marketing materials or visual content. Whether you’re a boutique owner making social posts, a restaurant making menus, or a startup preparing pitch decks, Canva is extremely useful.

4. HubSpot (with AI content assistant & ChatSpot) – AI for marketing, sales, and CRM

In 2025, HubSpot has embedded AI across its tools – notably the AI Content Assistant (for writing and ideation within HubSpot) and ChatSpot (a conversational AI assistant for your CRM)

These AI features help you create content, manage your customer data, and automate sales tasks with simple prompts.

🔸 Main features:

• Content Assistant: Built into HubSpot’s editors, it can generate blog posts, marketing emails, landing page copy, and more using OpenAI’s GPT model. This means when you’re in HubSpot composing an email or a social post, you can click a button and have AI draft it for you, or suggest ways to improve it. It can brainstorm topics (“Give me 5 blog ideas about sustainable fashion”) or even rewrite text to change tone or length.
• ChatSpot: You can ask it things like “How was our website traffic this month?” or “Create a new contact for John Doe with email john@example.com”, and it will execute those tasks. ChatSpot can draft follow-up sales emails, fetch you reports (“Show deals closing next month with amounts”), add notes to CRM records, and even do lead research (it can find companies in a certain industry via integration).

🔸 Who it’s best for:

If you already benefit from HubSpot’s CRM, email marketing, or website CMS, turning on the AI features is a no-brainer to get more done faster.

It’s especially useful for small marketing teams that have to produce a lot of content across blogs, social media, and emails – the AI assistant can greatly accelerate that. Sales teams can use ChatSpot to get quick insights and automate CRM updates, which means more selling time and less admin. Notably, HubSpot has a free CRM tier, making it accessible even to startup, and the core AI tools have been made available to all tiers (with more advanced capabilities for paid tiers).

5. Zapier – Automation with a dash of AI

Zapier is a well-known automation tool that connects different apps together, enabling “Zaps” that automatically move data or trigger actions between services.

For example, “When I get a new web order, add the customer to Mailchimp.”

Zapier has woven AI into its platform, making it even easier to create automations with natural language and integrate AI steps (like sending text to ChatGPT) in your workflows.

🔸 Main features:

• No-code workflow builder – Set up automated workflows across 7,000+ apps (CRM, email, social media, spreadsheets, you name it) without coding.
• Natural Language Actions (NLA) – Tell Zapier in plain English what you want to automate, and it tries to build the Zap for you that takes incoming support emails, sends the text to ChatGPT for summarising, then posts the summary into Slack – all automated.

🔸Who it’s best for:

Any small business that uses multiple software tools and wants to streamline operations. If you’ve ever thought, “I wish Tool A and Tool B would update each other,” Zapier is for you. It’s widely used by entrepreneurs, office managers, marketers, and even freelancers. Common use cases include syncing contacts from lead forms to CRMs, automating social media posts, routing customer inquiries, and creating reports. With new AI agents, even roles like customer support or marketing can benefit (imagine automatically personalising follow-up emails using an AI step).

6. Notion AI – AI-powered productivity and knowledge management

Notion is an all-in-one workspace app for notes, documents, databases, and project management that many startups and small businesses love.

Notion AI can help you write, summarize, and extract insights from your notes and wikis, essentially acting like an “AI team member” that lives in your company's knowledge base.

🔸 Main features:

• In any Notion page, you can use Notion’s AI to generate content (write a draft for a blog post, create a job description, etc.), or to improve existing text (shorten, expand, change tone) with one click. You can also ask it questions about your content – like “What are the key risks mentioned in this project doc?” – and it will answer by referencing the document, which is incredibly useful for extracting info.
• AI Meeting Notes, which automatically transcribes and summarises meetings (integrating with Zoom/Teams) so you never have to take notes manually.
• Enterprise Search with AI Q&A allows you to query across all your connected tools (Google Docs, Slack, etc.) via Notion.

🔸 Who it’s best for:

Teams that already use Notion, especially startups, agencies, and project teams. Notion AI is fantastic for those who do a lot of writing or note-taking: founders drafting investor updates, HR creating policy docs, consultants preparing reports, etc. I

It’s also great for solo entrepreneurs who need a “second brain” to organise ideas and content.

7. Grammarly (with GrammarlyGO) – AI writing enhancement

Grammarly is a well-known AI writing assistant that helps correct grammar and improve writing clarity. In recent years, with the introduction of GrammarlyGO, it now also helps you compose and rewrite text based on context. It works across virtually any app or website through browser extensions or desktop integration.

🔸 Main features:

• Grammarly provides real-time grammar, spelling, and punctuation corrections as you type, plus suggestions to improve conciseness and tone. It can detect the tone of your message (e.g., “friendly”, “formal”) and let you adjust it.
• With GrammarlyGO, you can do things like click a prompt to “draft a reply” to an email – Grammarly’s AI will generate a full email response that you can then tweak.
• Another neat feature: you can highlight a piece of text you wrote and ask Grammarly to rewrite it in a different style (say, more formal, or more engaging). Grammarly’s AI draws on a vast dataset of writing to ensure the suggestions not only are correct, but also sound natural and professional.

🔸 Who it’s best for:

Anyone who writes as part of their job, which is most of us. Customer support reps crafting emails, marketers writing copy, managers putting together important proposals, and entrepreneurs doing a bit of everything will all benefit from Grammarly.

8. Intercom (Fin AI) – AI chatbot and customer support assistant

Intercom is a popular customer messaging platform that has infused AI into its support toolkit with Fin. This AI chatbot can resolve customer queries by pulling information from your knowledge base.

🔸 Main features:

• Fin AI chatbot: Once enabled, Fin will use your existing help articles and FAQs to answer customer questions in the chat widget. It’s powered by GPT-4 but grounded in your content, which means it won’t hallucinate answers – it gives accurate responses based on what you’ve documented. Customers can ask natural questions (“How do I reset my password?”) and Fin will provide a relevant solution snippet, even linking to the full article for more details.
• AI Article Suggestions: After a long support chat, Intercom can generate a summary for your record or for follow-up (saving agents' time writing wrap-up notes). Additionally, Intercom’s system can analyze the tone/sentiment of customer messages to prioritise angry customers.
• Fin Visual, which can analyze and answer questions about images sent by customers (like a screenshot), although that’s cutting-edge.

🔸 Who it’s best for:

Businesses that deal with a lot of customer inquiries – SaaS companies, e-commerce stores, fintech services, and any online business with a help center.

9. Mailchimp – AI-powered email marketing for SMEs

Mailchimp is a leading email marketing platform, very popular among small businesses for sending newsletters, promotions, and automated emails.

🔸 Main features:

• Subject line helper: Mailchimp’s AI analyses millions of email campaigns and can predict how engaging a subject line will be. It will give you a score or suggestions to improve it (e.g., “add a number” or “keep under 9 words” to boost open rates).
• Content optimizer: This feature uses AI to review your email content and suggest improvements. For instance, it might say your email is too wordy or lacks a clear call-to-action, based on what historically drives engagement. It also checks tone and readability.
• Send time optimization: Mailchimp can automatically schedule your emails at the time it predicts each subscriber is most likely to open – leveraging machine learning on prior open data (so one contact might get it at 10am, another at 7pm).
• Product recommendations: For e-commerce users, Mailchimp’s AI can analyse purchase history and suggest which products to feature to each customer for higher likelihood of purchase (personalised content generation).
• Predictive segmentation: It can predict things like which subscribers are more likely to buy again, or who is at risk of churning, so you can target them accordingly (e.g., send a re-engagement offer to those likely to become inactive).

🔸 Who it’s best for:

Any small to mid-size business doing email marketing. If you have a mailing list (even a few hundred contacts), Mailchimp’s AI can help you make the most of it. It’s particularly beneficial for e-commerce (with product recs and purchase likelihood predictions) and for businesses actively trying to grow and retain customers through email.

10. Shopify Magic – AI tools for E-commerce on Shopify

Shopify Magic is the suite of AI features within Shopify (one of the most popular e-commerce platforms in the UK and globally). For entrepreneurs running online stores on Shopify, these AI tools help generate product descriptions, marketing emails, and even answer customer questions using your store’s data.

🔸 Main features:

• AI product description generator: You can enter a few keywords about a product (or even just have the product title and some attributes from your catalogue) and Shopify Magic will create a compelling, SEO-friendly product description in seconds. It can even take into account a desired tone (e.g., playful vs. professional).
• AI email campaigns: Shopify Magic helps craft marketing emails with optimised subject lines, content, and send time suggestions (similar to what Mailchimp does, but directly in Shopify if you use Shopify Email). It “knows your store” – meaning it can reference your products or recent promotions when drafting content.
• Sidekick (Chatbot Assistant): You can ask, “Hey Sidekick, how were sales this week compared to last week?” and get a quick analysis, or even request “Create a discount code for 10% off Christmas sale”, and Sidekick will execute that setup. It connects data points to deliver insights and can carry out store admin tasks via chat.
• Image generation and editing: Need quick product imagery? Shopify Magic can generate backgrounds or marketing banner images using AI to match your theme, which is useful for stores with limited design resources.

🔸 Who it’s best for:

If you have an online store on Shopify, especially if you manage it mostly by yourself or with a small team, these AI tools are extremely handy. It’s also useful if you release products frequently (e.g., a print-on-demand store adding new designs regularly) – you won’t bottleneck on writing each description. And anyone who’s not fluent in crafting marketing language in English will appreciate the AI’s ability to turn basic info into great copy.

ANNA Money – An excellent addition to your toolkit of AI tools for small businesses

If you're managing a UK small business and feel bogged down by admin, ANNA Money makes everyday financial tasks easier. From sorting receipts and sending invoices to managing tax reminders and expense tracking – its AI-powered capabilities simplify the things that usually take up your time.

Built for UK regulations and backed by friendly local support, ANNA lets you stay compliant without the fuss.

👉 Explore ANNA Money today and make one of the best AI tools for small businesses work for you.