Which AI assistant should a small business use?

One of the first hurdles small businesses face when starting to use an AI assistant is knowing which one to use. While they all work in much the same way, they have different strengths, weaknesses and associations depending on your intended use – so Googling ‘which one is best?’ can only take you so far.

Here’s a quick guide to help you decide between the four most commonly used assistants: ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini and Claude.

Start with what you already use

The first thing to know is that only two of the four are standalone, so depending on your setup, there may already be an assistant associated with the software you use.

If your business runs on Microsoft 365, Copilot sits inside Word, Excel, Outlook and Teams, making it the obvious choice for you. It can see your documents, email and meetings without you needing to connect anything at all. Ask it to summarise a thread or pull the numbers out of a spreadsheet and it already knows where to look.

If you use Google Workspace, Gemini does the same across Gmail, Docs, Sheets and Drive.

In almost all circumstances, this head start brings more value than any feature comparison list. A tool that can already see your work will require far less effort from your team than one that needs you to paste things into it, or set up an integration.

So if you are already using Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, Copilot or Gemini is the sensible place to start. The rest of this article can help you decide whether you need anything running alongside it.

What it costs, and why the two differ

Microsoft and Google have taken opposite approaches to how they charge for AI.

Google integrated Gemini into Workspace in January 2025. It is included in the Business plans, so if you are already paying for Workspace, you have effectively already purchased Gemini. The downside is that you cannot decide which team members get access, and you cannot turn it off.

Microsoft sells Copilot as a per-user add-on on top of a qualifying Microsoft 365 licence. This means it costs you more than Gemini, but you can give access only to those who need it, and you can trial it with a small number of staff first.

So if you will be using Gemini, the best plan is to get stuck in straight away, experiment with what can be done and see what is useful for you. If you will be using Copilot, decide which couple of team members would benefit most from an AI assistant, and start by buying seats for them alone.

ChatGPT and Claude

Neither of these is tied to an office suite, so the comparison is based purely on the work they do.

ChatGPT has the largest ecosystem around it. It has the most integrations and the most third-party tools that connect to it, and it is the one your team is most likely to be familiar with already, having used it at home – which lowers the training burden.

Claude shows its strengths when it comes to editing longer documents, and on tasks where you want instructions followed closely rather than improvised. If your team are regularly reading long contracts or compiling data from reports, Claude is a stronger option.

Both have business plans where your data is not used for training. The free and personal ChatGPT plans work differently. OpenAI turns data sharing on by default, and you have to switch it off yourself under Settings, Data Controls, ‘Improve the model for everyone’. If anyone on your team is using a personal account for work, that toggle is the first thing to check.

When it needs in-depth knowledge of your business

All four are general tools. They contain a lot of general knowledge about the world, but nothing about the specifics of your operation.

A custom GPT reduces that knowledge gap. It is a version of the assistant set up with your own material behind it, so it can give answers using your pricing, your policies, your product range and your way of describing things. This removes a lot of work for teams that have to answer similar questions all day.

It is not without limitations, though. A custom GPT is still an assistant that you talk to, and it usually relies on the answer being in a document it can access. If the job you need it for is more of a process than a question, and it needs to run reliably in the same way every time, a bespoke tool might be more appropriate for you.

Testing it out

Start with the one associated with your office suite, if you use one. If you don’t, pick the one whose strengths best match the problems you need to solve.

Adoption is often the biggest hurdle when introducing AI to your business. So whichever you use, start by asking a few team members at a time to try it, then ask them what they found it useful for. If nobody can give you a detailed answer, chances are you need to try a different assistant, look at something custom, or accept that an AI assistant is not going to benefit you at the moment.

Getting it set up

We help businesses choose, set up and manage AI tools, and we are vendor-neutral. We take no commission from Microsoft, Google, OpenAI or Anthropic, so we have no reason to steer you towards any of them.

If you have already bought something and cannot get it working, or you are trying to decide before you commit, we do a free 20-30 minute call. It is part of our managed AI service.

Send us a message and tell us what you are trying to do.