Forbes asked 20 tech leaders how small businesses should use AI right now — here's what it means for yours

"The highest-leverage starting point is customer communications"

Anthony Oren of Nero Consulting put it plainly in the Forbes panel: quotes, follow-up emails and responses to common questions are where a solo operator reclaims hours per week. Steven Singer of Julius Silvert made the same argument about the inbox — communication overhead is the tax nobody budgets for.

The gap between that advice and a working system is implementation. Drafting a reply faster still means you are the one reading the message, opening the tool, editing the draft and sending it. The saving only compounds when the routine enquiries never reach you at all.

That is the job New Phase Engage does. The AI receptionist answers hours, pricing, services, branch and availability questions on your website and WhatsApp, immediately, in your business's own words — and only escalates the conversations that genuinely need you.

"Build the strongest knowledge infrastructure", not the most AI

Babajide Ojuola's contribution is the one small businesses most often skip. His view is that the winners in the AI era will not be the businesses with the most AI, but those that capture what they know so the AI has something true to work from.

Without that, a generic chatbot invents a cancellation policy and you inherit the dispute. With it, every answer traces back to a record you control.

New Phase Engage treats your business knowledge as the source of truth: services and prices in rands, opening hours per branch, delivery areas, promotions with end dates, and your written cancellation and refund terms. You can import your existing website to populate it in minutes, then review what came across. When something is not in there, the assistant says so and offers to get a person to confirm — it does not guess.

• Services, pricing and durations
• Hours and contact details per branch or location
• Delivery, collection and service areas
• Cancellation, deposit and refund policies
• Current promotions, with an expiry date

"Improve decisions, not replace people"

Paul Speciale of Scality argued the biggest advantage comes from making better use of information you already have, and Amirtha Saminathan of Lowe's described AI as a decision assistant rather than a content generator. Tamanna Kottwani of Clutch framed the real question as how to use AI without outsourcing human judgment.

In practice that means the AI should hand your team a decision, not a transcript. New Phase Engage scores every conversation for buying intent — low, medium, high or hot — writes a two-line summary, and recommends the next action, so whoever picks up the follow-up already knows what to say. The human still makes the call. They just make it with the context in front of them.

"Analyze customer conversations for insights"

Harsh Jangid of Coozmoo called this one of the highest-impact uses of AI for a small business: reviewing conversations to surface recurring objections, buying triggers and common questions, then using those insights to fix your website copy and sales messaging.

Your enquiries are already a research dataset — most businesses simply never read them in aggregate. The New Phase Engage dashboard shows your most-asked questions, the products and services customers keep requesting, and where conversations stall or get handed to a human. That tells you which page to rewrite and which service to promote, without commissioning research.

"Target a bottleneck, not a trend"

Mahati Kumar of Meta gave the panel's most useful discipline: introduce AI into one workflow where the team repeatedly loses time, then measure whether speed, quality or customer satisfaction actually improved.

For most service businesses in South Africa the bottleneck is the same — enquiries arriving on WhatsApp and the website, often after hours, while the team is doing the work. So measure that one thing: how many enquiries were answered without a human, how many turned into confirmed bookings, and how many after-hours messages would otherwise have waited until morning.

New Phase Engage reports exactly those numbers, and pricing is based on confirmed bookings rather than conversations — so the cost tracks the outcome you are measuring.

• Enquiries handled end-to-end by the assistant
• Bookings confirmed without a staff member touching them
• After-hours enquiries answered inside a minute
• Conversations escalated to a person, and why

Where the Forbes advice needs a local translation

Several panellists recommended generic tools — ChatGPT for drafts, Copilot for the inbox. That is sound advice for internal work, and worth doing. It is a different thing from a customer-facing assistant.

Anything a customer sees carries commitments: a price you must honour, a slot you must have free, a policy you will be held to. That is why a customer-facing assistant needs your knowledge base behind it, a clean handover to a human, a diary it can actually check, and answers in rands with your real branch names and hours. New Phase Engage connects to Google Calendar, Microsoft 365 and Outlook so the availability it offers is the availability you genuinely have.