The best AI agents for SMEs

A recent study by PwC found that 79% of enterprises say that AI agents are already being adopted into their companies – and of those adopting AI agents, 66% say that they’re delivering measurable value through increased productivity.

But AI agents aren’t just for large enterprises. Small and medium-sized businesses are increasingly turning to AI agents to automate routine tasks, improve customer service, and support, and help their teams to work more efficiently and productivity.

So, let’s take a look at the best AI agents on the market today, as well as typical AI agent use cases to help you decide which one best suits your business needs.

What is an AI agent?

That makes them slightly different from AI assistants, which are primarily designed to help users with specific tasks by responding to requests.

Think of asking ChatGPT to write a social media post or customer email – that’s what AI assistants excel at. AI agents, on the other hand, are designed to be more proactive and goal-oriented and may be able to operate with less user input.

Rather than simply creating a customer email for you, an AI agent could automatically monitor your customer service inbox, identify urgent issues, draft appropriate responses, and queue them for your approval.

If you’re looking for help with individual tasks, then an AI assistant is a great choice. But if you want more proactive, autonomous support with complex tasks or even entire business workflows, then an AI agent may be a better choice.

Which is the best AI agent?

As with any tool, the best one is the one that suits your specific needs as a business. But we have narrowed it down to the top AI agents, all of which help to address common SME challenges like customer service, sales automation, and operational efficiency.

Microsoft 365 Copilot

Transform your everyday business operations with AI that’s built directly into the tools you already use like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and Teams. It works proactively across these applications to provide intelligent assistance without constant prompting. Key capabilities include:

• Automatically draft emails, documents and presentations based on your prompts and existing content

• Proactively suggests email responses and identifies priority messages in Outlook

• Quickly generate meeting summaries and action items from Teams calls, and seamlessly distribute to all attendees

• Analyse data in Excel and automatically create charts, summaries and actionable insights

• Create professional presentations with just a couple of prompts on design and content

Best suited to: SMEs that already have Microsoft products embedded in their business and businesses looking to improve productivity without the need for new software.

Zendesk Answer Bot

Answer Bot is built into Zendesk Guide, using machine learning to respond to customer questions by using content from your knowledge base. It can handle most routine enquiries, only escalating to human agents for particularly complex issues, which helps to save your agents’ time. Key capabilities include:

• Automatically respond to common customer questions using your existing help articles

• Learns from customer interactions, improving response accuracy over time

• Hands-off complex queries to agents with full context

• 24/7 availability, ensuring customers can always access support, even outside of normal working hours

Best suited to: Any SME looking to provide 24/7 customer service without the need to hire any additional staff and businesses with high volumes of customer support requests.

Salesforce Agentforce

Automatically capture, qualify and sync new leads from any source directly into your Salesforce CRM with this AI agent, and keep your pipeline updated 24/7. It handles initial outreach automatically, giving your sales team more time to focus on other tasks like nurturing existing relationships, helping you to scale your lead generation efforts, qualify prospects and improve your pipeline.

Key capabilities:

• Sending customised outreach emails to prospects

• Sending follow-up emails

• Answering questions from prospects using your business information

• Handling off-topic replies

Best suited to: Any business that’s looking to scale their sales operations without increasing headcount and those with complex sales cycles or sales processes that require lead qualification.

HubSpot Breeze

Improve your marketing and customer relationship management with HubSpot’s comprehensive collection of AI agents that can do everything from creating qualified leads to automating personalised campaigns. Key capabilities include:

• Create personalised social media posts that are tailored to your audience and brand voice

• Automate email marketing campaigns

• AI marketing automation tools for website design and content creation – as well as seamless distribution

Best suited to: Growing businesses with a focus on digital marketing – but with limited internal marketing resources.

Free vs paid AI agents

Should you opt for free AI agents or paid ones? The choice ultimately comes down to your business needs and how critical these tools are for your day-to-day operations. Luckily, most AI agents offer both free and paid options, which makes it easier to test out different options before committing to one.

Free tools are often sufficient for basic tasks like content generation and simple automation, but if you want to create custom workflows and automated reporting, you may need to commit to a paid subscription.

Before deciding, it’s best to consider what you need your AI agent to accomplish. If you’re looking to automate simple tasks like drafting emails or basic data analysis, then a free tool may do everything you need. But if you need to manage complex workflows, integrate with your existing CRM, or handle customer communications, then paid plans may offer the higher-level features you need.

Find out how AI can help your business

Whether you need to streamline sales processes, improve team productivity, increase the efficiency of your marketing efforts, or better manage your customer relationships, an AI agent could help you achieve more, without the need for additional effort from your teams.

Discover more about how AI can help your business on V-Hub.