Between the public holidays and scheduled vacations, it’s crucial that companies know how to automate business during the holiday season. Even though it can be difficult to keep operations running with fewer employees, artificial intelligence has made it a lot easier. 

There are tons of useful tools and services that can take on the work while your employees are out. Whether it’s chatting with customers or handling your marketing campaigns, AI can be an extremely valuable asset to your team. In this article, we’ll share a couple of AI tools to help you automate your business during the holidays.

AI Tools to Help You Automate Business During the Holiday Season

Chatbots 

Whether you’re B2B or B2C, customer service is important for practically every type of business. This is especially true during the holidays when many companies see an increase in customer service inquiries. But if your customer service reps are taking time off, you’ll need an efficient AI tool to act as a contact point for your customers.

Chatbots can handle a wide range of questions, from answering questions about products to tracking customer orders. Installing this on your website is a smart idea – not just for the holidays, but for year-round assistance as well. They operate 24/7, meaning your customers can get the answers they need even during standard operating hours. 

Here are a couple of well-known customer service chatbot tools:

• Zendesk AI

• Intercom

• Drift
• Chatfuel

Marketing Automation

For many businesses, the holidays are arguably the busiest time of the year. And just because you’re employees are taking vacation doesn’t mean your marketing campaigns are! Between Black Friday sales, Christmas shopping campaigns, and New Year’s deals, the end of the year is important for many companies.

By using an AI-powered marketing tool, you can automate your ad campaigns and promotions during the holidays. These tools can do a wide variety of tasks, from posting on social media to creating segmented customer lists. Some of them can even analyze past campaigns and give advice on how to run things better. 

If you’re looking for a marketing automation tool, check out these AI tools:

• Albert AI (ad creative optimization)
• Mailchimp (email marketing automation)
• Kissmetrics (customer interaction and engagement analysis)
• Smartly (social media and ad campaign generation)

In-House Workflow Management

Keeping your teams and employees organized can be especially tricky if people are away from the office. But this is where an AI-powered tool can come in handy. There are lots of different tools to streamline your in-house workflow, ensuring that everyone stays productive and aligned on company priorities.

Best of all, AI can keep projects moving with little to no oversight. With the right prompt, it can ensure all operations are running smoothly even if people are gone during the holidays. Whether it’s assigning tasks, sending reminders, or keeping calendars in sync, these tools are a must for internal operations. 

Here are a couple of useful AI tools for managing your in-house workflows:

• Notion
• ClickUp
• Trello

Website Management 

For the most part, websites can typically remain in operation without needing constant hands-on management. But some companies may want to update their site for the holidays. Adding new products, optimizing the customer experience, or uploading holiday-focused designs may be necessary. And what happens if something crashes? Do you have measures in place to not only monitor but also fix these types of potential issues?

If your developers and engineers are out for a few days, making these types of changes can be difficult and risky. Thankfully, AI can also take on the task of making changes to your website. 

When it comes to updates and/or safety checks, these AI tools can be extremely useful for your company:

• WP Engine (24/7 website monitoring for outages and downtime events)
• Squarespace (product descriptions, website copy, template design)
• Dynamic Yield (custom recommendation engine based on customer behavior)

Content Creation

Reaching your customers during the holidays requires targeted messaging and curated content. Whether you’re writing blog posts or creating specific visuals, producing holiday content is important for many businesses. 

But how do you do this when your creative teams are on vacation? Well, AI is incredibly useful when it comes to content creation. In fact, there are so many easy-to-use chatbot tools (like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini) that allow you to do that in a few seconds. Simply type in your prompt, and with AI assistance, you’ll get ideas, text, and images specific to your request. 

However, there may be instances when you want AI to produce something more elaborate or detailed. In these cases, we recommend one of the following AI tools:

• Jasper (content tailored to your company’s brand, voice, and style)
• Canva (logo, graphic, and presentation creator)
• Surfer SEO (SEO-optimized content)

Inventory Management

Need help running your online or in-person retail shop? Using an AI-powered inventory management tool can ensure you’re prepared for the busy holiday season. These types of tools can predict product demand, manage stock levels, and even reorder supplies. 

On top of that, there are also tools to help you with order fulfillment and operations. Using AI, you’ll be able to optimize how your products are packaged, shipped, and even delivered!

If you are selling or distributing physical products, these are the AI inventory tools to invest in:

• Extensiv Order Management 

• Fishbowl Inventory

• Shipbop

AI is one of the most useful tools to help you automate business during the holiday season. Marketing, inventory management, and project planning – AI can be used for a wide variety of business-related tasks. And despite what you may think, learning how to prompt and utilize AI isn’t that difficult. By taking a course on AI marketing or generative AI prompting, you can gain valuable skills to stay competitive in today’s market.