You’re an expert in your industry, but as a business leader, you’re often asked to manage work that’s outside your wheelhouse.
Writing marketing copy, designing direct mailers, and creating enticing proposals are essential to growing your business. But they’re skills you may not have (or have time to cultivate).
That’s where AI comes in. Think of it as an assistant to support your work in areas outside your zone of excellence. When you can tap into AI help, you free up time to focus on your areas of expertise while allowing the AI to assist with critical tasks that aren’t industry-specific.
What’s the best part about the recent AI boom? Dozens of new tools are coming onto the market. We’ve tracked down the latest and greatest, specifically with contractors and call centers in mind. Here’s our baker’s dozen of the best free AI tools to explore:
AI can augment your workflow, but it’s not ready to run its own show (at least not yet). Consider these points when interacting with any AI tool.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s look at the 13 best free AI tools for contractors and call centers.
Surely, you’ve heard of this one. Launched in November 2022, ChatGPT is the tool that sparked our current cultural obsession with AI.
ChatGPT is a type of AI called a large language model (LLM). Essentially, it’s gobbled up countless pieces of writing from human authors and has “learned” how to write. What it’s actually doing is guessing what word should come next in a sentence, but it’s darn good at it.
How can you use ChatGPT in your business? Here are some ideas to get you started:
Are you looking for more ChatGPT tips and tricks for your business? We've got you covered with our post on How to Use ChatGPT for Home Improvement Businesses.
PPC is a great lead generation strategy, but crafting Google Ads can be tricky–they have particular parameters, and writing copy that fits within them and gets your message across is a tall order.
Enter Google Ads’ new chat function. If you’re stuck, you can open the chat and share some language from your website with the Google Ads AI bot. Google AI will whip up suggested keywords, copy, and images–everything you need for a great ad.
Of course, you should finesse the output, but this integration allows Google AI to tap into source material already written in your brand voice, giving you a head start.
Nailing your written communication is vital to your success. When customers receive a meandering, typo-laden email from a business, it doesn’t make a great impression.
But if your memories of high school English are foggy, that’s okay! You have Grammarly. Grammarly goes beyond basic spell check and provides guidance on tone, clarity, engagement, and delivery.
Recently, the brand introduced GrammarlyGO, which adds another level of AI integration into the platform. GrammarlyGO can help draft text within specific parameters you’ve set (Like, “Write an announcement about our latest project reveal in a casual, witty voice”).
Grammarly’s tools help you learn (or re-learn) the rules of grammar, build confidence in your writing skills, and produce more effective written communications.
There’s a reason professional graphics looks so good. Designers train for years to understand concepts like color theory and master tools like InDesign.
But you’ve learned another discipline and might not have the skills to whip up a perfect mailer, business card, or brochure for your business. Fortunately, Canva’s Magic Design tool can help you create something that looks like a pro did it.
You input your media into Canva, and Magic Design runs with it, serving up template suggestions that fit the image. You can refine its recommendations by specifying a “vibe or theme” and style. And when you share your headline, it incorporates it into the template previews.
Again, the first output won’t be perfect. But Magic Design gives you a solid foundation; you can finesse from there.
If you’ve ever wished for a personal assistant, AgentGPT might be the AI tool for you. Fueled by ChatGPT, AgentGPT adopts a persona (or “agent”) to help you break down big goals into small tasks.
Let’s say you want some help with your upcoming strategic planning process. You can assign your agent the goal: “Undertake a SWOT analysis of a business in the home remodeling industry. Looking at the broader industry, identify the potential strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats faced by a mid-sized contracting business in greater Boston.”
While AgentGPT will not do all the work for you, it will whip up a checklist of the smaller tasks you’ll need to accomplish to achieve this big goal. Those tasks might include things like “Research competitors in your market” or “Identify trends in costs for inputs (i.e., raw materials and labor).”
In some cases, it will provide cursory research, but remember, generative AI can hallucinate, so you should double-check any research or data to ensure they are accurate.
Copywriting is a specific skill set. Copy for your website, ads, and email is meant to grab attention and get results.
Even when you run a great business that offers clients something unique, it’s not always easy to articulate your value. Copy.ai helps you draft marketing copy that stands out.
One of its unique features is its Brand Voice tool. You can feed Copy.ai examples of existing copy written in your brand voice, and it will analyze your words to “learn” the specific way you speak to customers. This helps it create outputs that align with your voice and tone, which can mean less tweaking for your human team.
Excel is a potent tool if you know how to use it. Its formulas allow business owners to quickly analyze critical data and create visual representations of those numbers.
If you don’t know how to use formulas, you’re probably using Excel as a glorified list and missing out on a considerable part of its value. Well, formula bot can change that.
Feed formula bot a prompt in plain English explaining what you’d like to accomplish, and it will create a formula to do just that. It works for both Excel and Google Sheets.
The platform has also introduced an integration with ChatGPT that allows you to do more in text-heavy spreadsheets. You can analyze the sentiment of a passage to see if it’s positive or negative, group information into categories, extract specific text, and more.
How many hours of your life have you lost to PowerPoint? Creating a gorgeous pitch deck, proposal, or new employee onboarding presentation can help you make a great first impression, but it takes a lot of time.
Canva is back on our list with its Presentations tool. As with other business collateral and digital designs, you can input an image into Magic Design and ask it to generate a presentation inspired by your input.
Canva also allows you to upload a brand kit with your color palette, font, logo, and graphics so anyone from your team can create a presentation that aligns with your brand’s visual standards.
When communicating with prospects, knowing what to say next can be challenging. If you’re feeling stuck, Vidyard’s AI sales script generator can help you craft communication for any scenario.
Simply input a little relevant information about the message you hope to convey. Try a prompt like, “Write a 30-second sales script to follow up with [prospect name] about our recent in-house consultation on their kitchen renovation.”
Vidyard will provide you with a script you can finesse and use as the basis for a video follow-up, phone call, email, or text.
You might also find our sales conversation techniques helpful
Striking the right balance in a cold email is tricky. You don’t want it to be too long, but you want it to get your value proposition across. You don’t want to sound pushy, but you want to elicit a response. It’s so easy to get tangled up in the drafting process.
Lavender AI created its email assistant tool to get you unstuck. Install the Chrome extension to get real-time coaching right inside your email.
As you draft your message, Lavender AI assigns a score between 0 and 100, and it provides suggestions to help you optimize everything from your subject line to body copy to give your email the best shot at being read.
Google’s AI platform Bard now integrates with all your Google Apps. Think of this Bard-Google Apps union as introducing a personal assistant to your Google Workspace.
You can use Bard to summarize emails, find critical information in messages you’ve received, and draft replies–all within your existing Google dashboard.
It can also help you plan work travel by pulling up meeting dates from an email chain and then searching Google Flights for itineraries that suit your schedule.
This AI tool is still brand-new (Google announced the integration on September 19, 2023), and early reports show there are still some kinks to work out. But with Google being an integral part of many businesses’ daily workflows, this is an AI tool to watch.
This one is free to SalesForce users, and with more than 150,000 teams relying on the CRM titan, your company may be one of them.
If you do use SalesForce, you’ll want to check out Einstein. Because it integrates with your CRM, it focuses on applying AI to essential sales and service work.
The list of things Einstein can do is lengthy. From automating lead and opportunity scoring to forecasting sales to routing cases for customer service triage, Einstein taps into your data to provide actionable insights and support for your sales and service teams.
For more ways to get the most out of your CRM, check out our tips on how to use a CRM right.
If you’re looking to hire great new talent, LinkedIn Recruiter can connect you with its network of millions. While the tool isn’t free, it offers a free trial (and, with it, access to its new set of AI-powered features).
First up is AI-Assisted Messages, which helps you send personalized notes to qualified candidates to stand out in a crowded message box.
LinkedIn has also introduced Likelihood of Interest, a tool that helps you gauge the probability that a candidate will respond to your outreach. By weighing various factors, LinkedIn enables you to focus your recruiting efforts on those most likely to be interested in hearing from you.
We've provided 13 of the best free AI tools out there but if you're looking for a more robust tool that can scale with your business, Hatch Assistant might be the AI tool for you!
Hatch Assistant includes AI bots that text with your customers for you, freeing up your team for the most important calls while ensuring you don't lose out on any business opportunities. You can have AI bots engage inbound leads, confirm appointments, and follow up on your quotes and jobs.
Not sure if Hatch Assistant AI bots can talk to your customers? Take it for a test run here.
Hopefully, this article has inspired you to explore how the vast array of free AI tools can help support your business! No matter what area of your work could use a little extra love, chances are there’s an AI tool to provide a helping (virtual) hand to your human team.
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