MY MOST USED AI TOOLS as an indie CPG Beauty Brand

Running a small business has always required a strange mix of creativity, logistics, and stamina. Now there’s a new ingredient in the soup: artificial intelligence. The term “AI” can sound like something out of a sci-fi movie, but in practice it’s more like having a few very fast interns who never sleep. They’re not perfect, they occasionally hallucinate nonsense, and they still need a human brain steering the ship—but used well, they can save serious time.

As someone juggling product development, marketing, and the thousand tiny decisions that come with running a brand, a few AI tools have become regular fixtures in my workflow. These are the ones I find myself reaching for the most.

ChatGPT: The thinking partner

If you could only keep one AI tool in your toolkit, this would probably be it.

I use ChatGPT as a kind of external brain. It’s where half-formed ideas go to become plans. It’s where messy notes turn into structured strategies. And it’s where the blank page stops being so intimidating.

For research, it’s a great jumping-off point. Instead of opening twenty tabs and digging through articles, I can quickly get an overview of a topic—whether that’s a marketing strategy, an industry trend, or how another brand is positioning itself.

For planning, it helps me map out everything from content calendars to launch timelines. The real magic isn’t that it gives the “right” answer—it’s that it helps you think faster. When you’re building a business, momentum matters, and having something that helps organize your thoughts quickly can make a huge difference.

Then there’s copywriting. I still edit everything heavily so it sounds like me, but ChatGPT is excellent for first drafts. Product descriptions, social captions, email outlines, blog posts—it gets the bones down so I can focus on refining the voice and story.

Think of it less as a replacement for creativity and more as a creativity accelerator.

Kive: The visual playground

If ChatGPT helps with thinking, Kive helps with seeing.

Kive is a visual AI tool that’s particularly useful for generating and modeling imagery. When you’re building a brand, visuals matter—a lot. But organizing references, testing visual directions, and creating fresh imagery can take a huge amount of time.

With Kive, I can experiment quickly.

It’s great for moodboarding, testing visual ideas, and generating striking imagery that can inspire campaigns or content. Instead of trying to imagine how a concept might look, you can see variations almost instantly. It turns the creative process into something more playful and exploratory.

For a small business owner who’s constantly producing social content, this kind of visual experimentation is incredibly helpful. Sometimes it sparks ideas you wouldn’t have landed on otherwise.

Holo.ai: The email helper

Email marketing is one of the most powerful tools a small business has—but writing emails consistently can be surprisingly time-consuming.

That’s where Holo.ai has been useful for me.

I often use it to generate email drafts or frameworks that I can then customize for my brand voice. Whether it’s a product announcement, a sale, or a quick update for customers, having a starting point speeds things up.

Like most AI writing tools, the key is editing. The first draft is rarely perfect. But it’s much easier to refine something that already exists than to stare at a blank screen wondering how to begin.

AI is a tool, not the brain

There’s a temptation to think of AI as something that will replace human creativity. In reality, it works best as an amplifier.

The human part still matters most: the taste, the storytelling, the understanding of your customers, the intuition about what feels right for your brand. AI just helps you move faster through the mechanical parts of the work.

Running a small business means wearing a lot of hats. If AI can help you take a few of them off—even temporarily—that’s a pretty powerful thing.

And the funny part is we’re probably still at the very beginning of what these tools can do. The entrepreneurs who treat them like creative collaborators rather than magic answers are the ones who tend to get the most out of them.

❤️ Līhau