8 New Small Business Ideas Using AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming part and parcel of every day life and business, making now the right time to take advantage of the myriad of new opportunities opening up.

More and more companies are actively looking for new ventures that can make use of their AIs. To succeed, they need to put AI within reach of as many people (from huge multinationals to home businesses) as possible.

In time, startups will find it easier and easier to access AI and machine learning systems with lower and lower intellectual barriers to overcome.

That's why we've decided to explore a wide array of AI driven startup ideas that you can use to find inspiration and ride the wave of change that AI is bringing (find more on our small business ideas page).

1. AI Tax Return Service

Personal income tax returns (as well as small business tax returns) are a chore for everyone. The rules and regulations surrounding taxation are often complicated - some would say byzantine - and ever-changing, making it difficult for everyone to ensure they are being accurate and efficient.

An AI driven service that has access to all the rules and regulations surrounding your specific and unique business & personal financial circumstances could not only do returns for you (saving a huge amount of time and effort), but could also make use of its superior knowledge of those rules in order to deliver savings and efficiencies that most people (even human tax practitioners) might not know about, understand or make use of.

With all earnings and expenditures properly captured and recorded and then analyzed and optimized by an AI (that also generates statements and returns) individuals and companies can focus their time and resources to growing their businesses instead of dealing with red tape and paperwork.

2. AI Personal Shopper

An app that looks at what you do, which influencers you like, what type of fashion you're into, what you spend on, how much you spend, when and where you like to spend it, could get to know a lot about what you like and don't like.

That information (via a number of popular apps) is already being monitored and used by brands and marketers in order to make more money out of you, the consumer.

A personal shopping assistant, driven by AI, could mix things up by not only finding and suggestion things an individual would love to buy, but also finding the best deals (in the background) to save them money on those purchases.

Set up affiliate relationships with brands and retailers and integrate their products, offers and deals into the AI that uses that pool of data to make personalized shopping recommendations based on what it knows about each individual user.

3. AI Butler

A household is a lot of work. More often than not people are busy, with both parents holding down jobs. Simply put, there is often not enough time to manage a household properly.

Integrate an AI driven app into a variety of household smart devices and let it control everything from maintaining the lawn (which it can water via smart sprinklers or mow using a robot mower) and the pool, to monitoring and managing security and access, looking at what groceries and cleaning supplies are running low, and so on.

The AI butler could live in an app on clients' phones and doesn't need it's own physical presence - only the data integrated with it from the various smart devices in the home.

The AI butler could even be given a household maintenance bank account in order to order and pay for food and other goods as required. It could open the door for delivery people and direct them as to where to leave or pack the goods (by utilizing security cameras and smart speakers).

4. AI Logistics & Supply Chain Manager

Supply chain management is a huge industry. With rising fuel and transport costs one the one hand and greater demand for free delivery on the other hand, companies are having to come up with innovative new ways to lower costs and meet demands.

An AI driven supply chain manager could oversee a company's entire supply chain by monitoring new orders and integrating with existing infrastructure plus 3rd party services (like advanced route optimization with Optergon) to ensure that everything from the warehouse to the client is managed and optimized to reduce costs and increase efficiencies.

5. AI Online Poker Player

Online poker is big business and there are plenty of extremely good players raking in decent amounts of cash. Develop a poker playing AI to start winning online games and make money winning tournaments (there are AI systems that have beaten top human players in poker already).

You would need to be first to market and win as much as possible before others catch on (perhaps this is already being done and we simply don't know about it because it would not be in the developer's interests to tell anyone).

6. AI Farm Manager

Farming and agriculture is a vital but extremely difficult industry. Farmers have a lot to contend with and agriculture in general is only going to get harder as climate changes have a larger and larger impact while the demand for food from human (and livestock) populations continues to grow exponentially.

Develop an AI that can make use of drones to monitor crops or livestock (there are already companies that offer drone based systems to help make monitoring large scale agriculture operations faster and cheaper - the AI could integrate with this existing technology) and make the best possible decisions for optimal management as well as reacting to emergencies.

The AI could not only control day to day operations such as irrigation and spraying, but ultimately make decisions on what products and services are required in order to react to infestations and outbreaks, disease, natural disasters and so on.

7. AI Marketing Agent

Marketing is a very complex and challenging industry with a lot of time and effort being spent gaining experience and knowledge that helps marketers generate the highest possible return on investment for their clients.

As we all know, this doesn't always work out so well for companies as marketers try to push boundaries in order to find new strategies and techniques to gain the edge over their competitors. Fundamentally, there is a lot of trial and error involved and this process is extremely expensive.

While you will find plenty of marketing agencies showing off their amazing successes you won't find any that can guarantee the same results time and again. An AI driven system would be able to accurately gauge its performance using its "experience" over time and at least offer potential clients a baseline performance guarantee. This alone would likely be a significant competitive advantage in the world of marketing.

8. AI Business Analyst

An AI with sufficient access to information in any specific market could likely spot gaps in the market that take human entrepreneurs longer to discover or stumble into. This could be extremely valuable to companies in competitive niches who could use these market gaps to direct where they invest resources.

Alternatively an artificial business analyst could generate great new business ideas as a service for people wherever they are in the world. By analyzing a huge array of information, from the local, state and national economy, to political trends, to banking and finance facilities, infrastructure and consumer demands, the AI could generate ideas for business opportunities that might otherwise lie hidden for too long or be missed entirely.

As an added bonus the AI could also offer support in the form of information to help startup new ventures (think along the lines of company registration, tax, government incentives, access to startup incubators, networking with VC and angels, and so on).

So those are just a few of the business ideas that harness the power of artificial intelligence to provide new opportunities and accomplish things that you might only have dreamed about a few years ago. What ideas do you have for AI? Are you already using AI in your own business?