How Small Businesses Are Leveraging Automation to Win in 2025

The past few months have seen a meteoric rise in relevance and competence in the automation field, with businesses across all industries and regions implementing automation in one way or another. And this is for good reason.

From the accuracy and productivity boost of marketing automation tools to the reduced costs businesses are experiencing by arming themselves and their staff with this technology, there’s a lot to love about automation in today’s professional world.

For small business owners, the impact of automation is even more pronounced. One-person teams can take on multiple roles without feeling as much strain as they once did. Plus, the output of their work can match or even exceed the accuracy and effectiveness of their own manual efforts.

Having said all this, this begs the question: how exactly are modern-day businesses utilising automation to squeeze more profits and enhance workplace productivity to heights never reached before?

If you want to learn more about these benefits, then you’re in the right place. We’ll get to the bottom of how small businesses are leveraging automation in 2025, as well as ways you can ride that wave to your and your business’s advantage.

Let’s jump right into it!

1. Automates Administrative Work

A lot of entrepreneurs don’t talk about the administrative tasks that fill up their day in the workplace. 

But the truth is that, before automation came around, many business owners spent a good number of hours a day fulfilling a high volume of administrative tasks to get their business moving. Think things along the lines of creating invoices, sending marketing emails, or replying to customer inquiries.

The good news is that technology has moved so fast today to the point that automation is very much capable of taking over these time-consuming routines. 

For instance, tools like Notion, Zapier, and QuickBooks can automate administrative work in various departmental fronts, from accounting to project management, enabling you and your staff to focus your time on more urgent and cognitively-heavy matters.

With automation, you can cut down the hours spent on monotonous and time-consuming administrative tasks exponentially. This not only saves you time but also saves you money by reducing the need to spend on manual labour hours, as you can get the results you want with just a few tweaks and a click of a button.

Want to learn more about the benefits of automation? This article by OFX gets into detail about its impact when handling accounts payable.

2. Boosts Marketing Efficiency

Another perk small businesses can expect with automation tools is the increased efficiency they provide for a wide range of marketing efforts. 

In the not-so-distant past, taking on marketing tasks usually involved spending long hours brainstorming copy, editing content, and subscribing to different tools to analyse and track results.

While these functions still exist today, automation has evolved to the point that these activities can be delegated to an AI tool like Make to streamline the process and boost productivity to unprecedented levels. 

For instance, AI can segment customer data automatically, making it easier to score conversions. It can also personalise, schedule and send emails as part of a broader marketing campaign—all without hitting the spam folder.

Don’t be fooled: automation doesn’t outright replace the skill and human touch that marketers provide, but it comes eerily close. It’s not uncommon for marketers and business owners to use these tools in some functions during their campaign for assistance. In fact, during busy periods, AI is often used to cover some tasks to help reduce the hours spent on various tasks.

3. Enhances the Customer Experience

Automation can also help enhance the customer experience for small businesses—but not in the way you might think. 

About 75% of customers prefer speaking with a real person when it comes to having their issues handled and dealt with, not an AI chatbot with pre-determined responses. 

This norm hasn’t shifted with the introduction of customer service-enhancing automation tools. As this is the case, businesses should still invest in hiring qualified agents for handling more complicated tickets, especially once demand ramps up.

That said, automation can still play a role in the customer service experience. For one, it can assist human agents by sorting customer inquiries and suggesting quick responses for common issues. It can also pull up relevant order details instantly. Furthermore, it can also send automated SMS updates to help customers be informed of their order statuses.

When used together, automation can make humans work faster—allowing real agents to provide more quality care to a wider customer base in a shorter amount of time.

4. Streamlines Operations

No matter the size or scale of your business, it’s bound to rely on systems to keep it running. These systems perform a wide range of functions, from transforming raw materials into final products to communicating with a wide range of stakeholders.

When handled manually, it’s not uncommon for gaps in the system to lead to inefficiencies. But with automation, things can carry along smoothly and with few hiccups.

Automation can take over and help process these workflows without needing human intervention. Processes such as generating purchase orders, updating the inventory stock, and syncing data between different departments can all be handled by various automation tools and technology tools that can streamline business processes and achieve efficiency.. 

This not only helps keep business functions consistent and transparent, but it also lowers turnaround time and improves the customer experience—making your business all the more likely to scale and succeed in time.

5. Helps Gather Customer Data

Data is crucial as it provides the foundation for businesses to make key decisions based on actual information and statistics. 

It removes the need to guess what customers want or what business strategy is optimal, as there are data points that can affirm certain actions or directions with more certainty than other branching paths.

How automation achieves this is simple: it collects and organises information in real time, without the need for constant manual tracking. 

Everything your customer does can be fed into a CRM tool and organised to make it easier to understand. Automation tools can even take it up a notch and generate reports and provide recommended courses of action in an easy-to-visualise dashboard.

With these insights, you and your team can come up with measured decisions to potentially help you make the best decisions for your business’s continuity and growth. 

We hope these tips helped you understand the core benefits of integrating automation into your small business. All the best in achieving success!