AI isn’t getting many positive headlines at the moment. Many people see the technology as a threat to jobs, while the creative industries are up in arms about its use of training data. Unions in the UK have called for strict guardrails around AI, while more than a thousand musicians recently released a silent album in protest.
While AI can certainly be abused, it’s also not without its potential benefits. For entrepreneurs, it might not be a case of putting guardrails up, but pulling barriers down. AI tools for content creation, planning and marketing are democratising the process of starting a business—making it easier to realise your ambitions, and kickstart life as an entrepreneur.
Creating image assets
Part of the odyssey of building your business online is learning just how much you need to pay for. Creating a website is a well-known ordeal, with developers often charging in the tens of thousands for even something relatively simple. Yet another underappreciated aspect of building a website and online presence is having enough images to populate your website and social media feeds—images that you have the right to use commercially.
Taking your own photos is always the best option, as it provides a visual point of reference for customers, making your business feel more grounded and real, and allowing you to precisely shape your brand image. But the honest truth is that this can be incredibly difficult. The photos have to be shot in an attractive way, and not all businesses are naturally photogenic, or make sense to take photos of. It can also be a considerable burden in terms of time and effort to take enough photos to sustain daily or even weekly posts.
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While you can use free stock images from sites like Pexels or Pixabay, these sites often lack industry-specific images, and the assets inevitably leave your site feeling impersonal. Paid stock images are also an option, but have that same issue of adding a cost burden to a new business. This is where AI image generation can be incredibly useful—generating unique, royalty-free images that can come incredibly close to the quality of paid photos.
Free options such as Bing Image Creator and Adobe Firefly offer powerful solutions with simple interfaces. To generate an image, you just need to enter a prompt (a description of the image you’re looking for) with as much detail as possible. If you were opening a bakery, for instance, you might enter a prompt for ‘A shop window with freshly-baked loaves of bread displayed in baskets’. The software will then generate several options, which you can choose between or refine your prompt if you haven’t gotten what you were looking for.
While you should check the terms of the software you’re using, most image generators allow for commercial use of generated images, which are considered unique to the prompt you have entered. Paid image generators and ‘freemium’ tools such as Canva can also allow you to create higher-quality images in specific dimensions, with more options for refining prompts and regenerating parts of an existing image—all of which can still be cheaper than using stock art.
Generating web copy
Writing skills can be another impediment to entrepreneurship. While you can source images from somewhere (even if they aren’t great), writing is something you can’t just copy. Particularly as a fledgling business, the way you position your brand and present yourself from the start is key. First impressions matter, and your writing—from your website, to social media posts, to marketing materials—all form a huge part of this.
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For many people, this is either a barrier to entry or a stumbling block they simply don’t think of. Starting a business can often be something people pursue instead of academia, and that means that writing may not be a natural part of your skill set. It’s easy to overlook how central compelling copy is to attracting customers and selling people on your idea until you step into entrepreneurship, and realise how much relies on your online presence.
Most people are now aware of tools like ChatGPT or DeepSeek, and how they can complete a variety of writing tasks. The uses of this that are often advertised are for doing school or university work, or things like legal forms and documents, neither of which is advisable. But they can be turned to almost any kind of writing you can think of. The trick isn’t just telling them what to write, though, but repeating it until you get the best possible result.
There are a few tricks you can use to improve the answers you get from AI writing tools. One is to start your prompt by telling the AI what kind of business it’s writing for, such as ‘Imagine you are writing for a small fashion retailer”. Another is to use the same conversation to ask multiple questions, as the AI will build a better picture of your business and what you’re looking for over time.
You should also ask it to improve anything you don’t like the first time around, particularly things that make it look obvious that it’s AI generated, whether that’s American spellings or overuse of bullet points. The mistake people often make is just asking for a bit of writing and then copying that straight onto their website. With a bit more effort, you can improve on the default output, and get something that sounds more human, more professional, and more specific to your business.
Ideas and planning
There’s some dispute over ChatGPT and other tools when it comes to writing content, as the result can be (if you don’t rework it) quite repetitive, and derivative of the stuff that’s already out there. A less controversial use of the software is for planning and idea generation. Procedural generation is great at taking the legwork out of less creative tasks, and can give you a real leg up when it comes to starting your business.
A good start might be a business plan. Although this may be used in some countries as part of the formation process (such as opening a bank account), a business plan is generally more for yourself and investors, to outline your plans for the business, your ethos, and your financial outlook for the future. While AI can’t put this entire document together, it can provide a great framework to help you along the way.
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A tool like ChatGPT can take your description of your mission statement or brand identity, and rewrite and expand on it to your liking. You can even ask AI to change the tone of what it’s writing, and aim it towards a specific audience, using more or less complicated language. These kinds of tasks—where you either want to speed things up, or take a thought or idea and put it into words—are ideal for AI.
The legal or financial aspects of starting a business shouldn’t be left to AI, at least not without expert oversight. But if you have figures to hand and simply want to present them in an appealing way, this is also something AI can help with. AI text generation tools can take data from a spreadsheet and turn it into an attractive document or presentation, while software such as Microsoft Excel or Google Sheets increasingly contains AI tools that can format tables and other data for you in stylish ways, saving a significant amount of time.
In its best form, AI should always be a way to support creativity and innovation rather than replace them. If you have a great business idea but feel the administrative and marketing side isn’t your forte, AI tools can make entrepreneurship more accessible. From generating image assets, to helping write pages of your website or social media posts, to refining your documents and plans, AI tools can be used for good—unleashing creativity and innovation, rather than destroying it.
If you need a little extra help to get started, feel free to get in touch. We’ve been helping entrepreneurs to start their own businesses in more than 30 countries worldwide for nearing on 20 years. Browse the menu above to find your country of choice, or contact us today to learn more.
