👋 Welcome back to AI for SME Success, your weekly dose of practical AI insights that matter to small businesses.
This week:
- A 7,900%-ROI AI use case, a perfect example of where AI pays off in a small business.
- The newest feature in Pomelli, Google’s free brand-learning tool for marketing campaigns.
- The step-by-step workflow that turns NotebookLM into your Voice of Customer tool.
- Claude vs ChatGPT in Excel. Which one belongs in your sidebar?
Let’s dive in! 👇
💰7,900%-ROI AI Use Case for Small Business
AI pays best where QA isn’t your company’s job.
Fast Company recently profiled Rebel Cheese, an Austin-based vegan cheesemaker. The company discovered they’d overpaid $250,000 in shipping fees, buried inside hundreds of pages of weekly carrier invoices with fees layered inside fees. As an SME with a lean team, Rebel Cheese had no bandwidth and no forensic accountant on staff.
Co-founder Kirsten Maitland handed a year of invoices and her shipping contract to Claude. Within an afternoon, Claude surfaced patterns that would have taken a human auditor weeks, including a new weight limit the carrier had implemented in early 2025 and never communicated.
But a one-time analysis wasn’t enough. The company needed an automated, repeatable process for an ongoing audit. They added Manus, an AI platform that orchestrates multiple agents to build working software, and used it to construct a Carrier Billing Discrepancy Detection Tool. The tool flags every shipment charged more than ten cents over their contracted rate, then auto-generates refund requests. The carrier has approved every claim submitted so far.
The company pays $200/month in AI subscriptions and recovers $1,500 to $4,000 every week. That’s an ROI of up to 7,900%.
They’ve since built more agents to research venture capitalists, prep for investor meetings, draft ads from historical data, and handle inbound partnership requests. All without hiring a single engineer.
Takeaway: The smartest place to use AI isn’t where accuracy is paramount. It’s where someone else checks the output. Skip regulatory filings, tax returns, and legal docs, where one bad output is on you. Lean into loss recovery, refund disputes, and vendor audits, where the counterparty has every incentive to verify each claim before issuing a credit.
🎨 Free Google Tool for On-Brand Visuals
Pomelli is Google’s free tool that learns your website and generates on-brand campaigns, videos, and product photos.
Here are notable features and how they compare to Canva:
- Product Catalog (May 2026). Add your products or services once, and Pomelli uses them to generate personalized campaigns and photoshoots automatically. Canva’s closest comparison is the Brand Kit, but it stores brand assets only (not your product inventory) and doesn’t auto-feed campaign generation or product photoshoots.
- Photoshoot (February 2026). Upload any product photo and get studio, lifestyle, floating, or “in use” shots back in seconds, powered by Nano Banana 2. Canva’s comparable features are Product Studio and AI Product Photos, but they don’t include automatic brand profiling like Business DNA, and you can’t generate new camera angles from a single photo.
Left: real photo. Right: Pomelli’s photoshoot.
- Animate (January 2026). Turns static content into short animated videos for Reels, TikTok, and Shorts using Veo 3.1. Canva’s comparable features are Image to Video and Create a Video Clip (also Veo-powered), but they don’t include automatic brand profiling like Business DNA, and outputs are capped by your monthly Canva AI credits.
For a small business owner, it’s worth trying. Setup takes about five minutes: visit labs.google.com/pomelli, sign in with a Google account, and enter your business website URL. Pomelli builds your Business DNA profile, which you can refine. Pick a campaign idea, edit variations with natural language prompts, then download and post manually.
🗣️ Customer Insights with NotebookLM
NotebookLM is another free AI tool from Google. It answers only from the sources you upload, with per-sentence citations, meaning it has little room to hallucinate.
That makes it the perfect tool for customer insight mining.
Step-by-step workflow:
- Upload your customer feedback. Include Google reviews, support emails, sales call transcripts, LinkedIn comments, and Instagram DMs. Paste them into one document, or upload as separate sources. The free tier handles up to 50.
- Ask these questions, one at a time:
- What exact words do customers use to describe the problem they had before buying?
- What objections come up most often, even in positive reviews?
- What opportunities surface: adjacent needs, missing features, or services they wish you offered?
- What trends are shifting in how customers describe their needs and expectations?
- Use the exact phrases as Instagram carousel hooks, email subject lines, website headlines, ad copy, or sales page bullets.
Free competitive research. Run the same workflow on your top competitor’s reviews. Ask: What do their customers complain about? What gaps could you fill?
Why it works. When customers read their own words on your page, they feel understood.
🛠️ChatGPT & Claude Moved into Your Spreadsheet. Here’s How to Choose.
ChatGPT moved into Excel and Google Sheets. Claude moved into Excel, PowerPoint, and Word.
ChatGPT for Excel and Google Sheets went generally available across all plans, including the free tier, powered by GPT-5.5 (OpenAI). ChatGPT lives in both Excel and Google Sheets. It’s the obvious pick for general productivity: budgets, trackers, expense analysis, formula fixes, pivot tables. The free tier handles most SME work. If your business runs on Google Sheets, this is your only option of the two.
Claude for Excel, PowerPoint, and Word became generally available on paid plans (Anthropic). Claude runs lives in Excel, PowerPoint, and Word. Its hidden feature is a “Work across files” feature that activates a sub-agent architecture, letting the Word agent and Excel agent communicate. Prompt Claude in Word to pull regional sales data from your Excel file, and it writes a fully formatted shareholder letter, signed in your name. No copy-paste. Starts at $20 per month. anthropicmindstudio
Recommendations:
- If your business uses Google Sheets, go with ChatGPT. Claude doesn’t go there.
- For general spreadsheet work (budgets, dashboards, expenses), start with ChatGPT. The free tier covers most cases.
- For heavy financial modeling, audits, or work that spans Excel, Word, and PowerPoint in one session, upgrade to Claude.
Thank you for reading today’s edition!
If this issue was valuable, pass it along to a fellow business owner. I’d love to hear your feedback at natalia@nataliabrattan.com.
See you next week,