Tech up for success

Top business tools owners are using to improve productivity, grow customers, and get ahead in 2024.

The best small business tech and tools make it simple and easy to manage everyday business tasks efficiently and cost-effectively. While there are those that are stock-standard, such as CRM software and accounting software, there’s a range of new wave AI-inspired tech that’s making automation simple while prioritising productivity.

Qassem Naim, the former Chief Transformation Officer at FCB New Zealand and start-up Founder of Circle, helps support Kiwi businesses by making customer technology, transformation, and AI easy. We asked him to share some of the cool tech and tools he’s currently working with, and he’s recommending to business owners.

Fireflies.ai 

An AI-powered notetaker for meetings. You can automatically join meetings when it’s connected with your calendar, and when the meeting is over, it summarises the content. Qassem says that this initially saved him heaps of time as a one-person start-up, “allowing me to stay engaged in meetings without missing any tricks or outtakes”. “Once the team grew it was a great way to onboard and help people get up to speed by sharing notes the app had taken.”

Loom 

A productivity app that enables easy recording and sharing of video messages/ screen recordings to cut down on emails and meetings. “Some nifty features include cutting out filler words, but it ultimately saves what would be a potential meeting or worse, PowerPoint that goes unread, and lets you explain and interact with the message,” explains Qassem.

LLMs like Gemini, GPT, and Claude 

“These [Large language models] are probably going to top most people’s lists. At Circle, we focus on applying them into automation workflows, as their possibilities are all but endless. We use them for content generation, data cleaning, analysis, and internal QA and feedback management,” says Qassem. There’s also currently work on multi-agent frameworks, or virtual teams to help solve complex problems that individual AI models struggle with.

Qassem says that Circle was borne out of the frustrations faced by business leaders who can no longer keep up with the exponential advancements of world-changing technology. 

“With thousands of business technologies to choose from, the lines increasingly blur, creating redundancies in capabilities and wastage in the form of excess spending for ‘shelfware’. We hate shelfware. You should, too. It is wasting your money and precious time. Our approach harnesses a new wave of talent that has evolved with the tech and emerged in lock-step with innovations of today ready to leapfrog [current skills sets],” he says.

With any tech investment, Qassem cautions leaders against buying into a tool, or framework – often with a hefty price tag – without a guiding strategy to develop the capabilities you seek or a pragmatic understanding of how to actually achieve the outcomes (or having anyone in the business who does).

“Sure you might be able to imagine how a new technology or a certain type of experience would benefit your business, but throwing money at the ambition without practical knowledge about how it will work and how you’ll be able to use it to drive an advantage, will at best leave you beholden to external partners to achieve any progress and at worst leave you with less budget and nothing to show for it.

“There’s no easy silver bullet you can buy that will grow your business for you, they are all table stakes, you need to find a way to apply these to create something novel.”

This article was originally published in the NZBusiness March 2024 Digital Issue. You can read the issue for free, here.