01/09/2026
There’s a lot more to AI than asking it to write an email or create a social media post.
One of the things that stood out to me in Metricool’s latest State of AI in Social Media report was how much the way people are using AI has changed in just a year.
Using AI for strategy has gone from 39% to 62%.
Using it to analyse data has gone from 32% to 59%.
And using it to automate repetitive tasks has more than doubled, from 20% to 43%.
That’s the bit I find interesting from a Connxess point of view.
When we talk to small businesses about AI, the conversation can still be very focused on ChatGPT or Claude and what it can write.
But some of the most useful applications we’re seeing aren’t really about writing at all.
It might be helping make sense of information that’s sitting in a spreadsheet. Looking for patterns in data. Taking information from one system and doing something useful with it somewhere else. Helping with research. Improving a process that currently involves somebody doing the same thing manually every week.
None of that is particularly flashy, and there’s still a person involved making decisions and checking that what comes out the other end is right.
An interesting question for a small business is where could AI actually be useful? What are your thoughts?
