Google’s useful Gemini AI tools can help salons create captivating content for their websites and research new beauty trends

Your front desk is slammed, your team is double-booked, and your to-do list is growing by the minute. Sound familiar?

If you haven’t tapped into the power of AI at your salon yet, you could be missing out on tools that lighten your load and sharpen your business edge. Google’s Gemini AI, for example, can generate text, analyze data, and even carry on realistic conversations with both your team and your clients.

Thanks to Gemini’s simple interface and smart software integrations, you don’t need to be a tech expert to master it. In fact, if you want to learn how to use Gemini AI to help your beauty business grow, all you need are a few simple pointers to get started. We’ve outlined five ways that salons, specifically, can use Google’s innovative tool. With a little creativity, you can use the power of generative AI to delight your clients and grow your business. 

How to use Gemini AI for salons

If you’re new to the world of artificial intelligence, you might find yourself asking, “What is Gemini AI?” The short answer is that it’s a set of generative AI tools from the search giant Google. To break that down further:

• Artificial intelligence (AI) is a computer algorithm that does things a human would normally do. Think “search engines that personalize your recommendations” or “marketing emails that address you by name.”

• Generative AI uses a massive set of training data to generate original text, images, audio, etc. Most mainstream generative AI tools can respond to simple prompts in plain English.

There are a few different ways to use Google Gemini. There’s a Gemini AI chatbot that can create text or pictures for you. If you use Google productivity software (Google Docs, Google Sheets, Google Slides, etc.), Gemini can summarize your documents or edit your work. These Gemini AI features are free to use. If you’ve used ChatGPT before, you should find Gemini pretty similar.

You can also get a paid Gemini account, which gives you access to video creation tools and a more sophisticated chatbot. The price ranges between $25 and $250 per month.

Before you use generative AI for your salon, there are a few limitations to keep in mind:

• Generative AI can’t have any original ideas. While AI tools are good at finding patterns, they can’t think or reason. You’ll never get an answer that wasn’t already somewhere in the AI’s training data.

• Generative AI hallucinates. When AIs state incorrect information with complete confidence, that’s called a hallucination. Believing everything an AI says could result in some bad business decisions.

• Generative AI could share your private information. The free version of Gemini collects the information you share with it. You can use the paid version to ensure a private workspace instead.

5 ways salons can leverage Gemini AI

1. Writing website content

Your salon might offer dozens of different services and sell hundreds of different retail products. Writing a paragraph or two about each one might take days of tedious, repetitive work. If you’d rather spend that time working with your clients, you can outsource the job to Gemini. If you submit a rough outline and some general guidelines for length and tone, Gemini AI can write hundreds of descriptions in minutes.

Just remember to read everything over first. The more descriptions you ask Gemini to write, the more likely you are to get a hallucination somewhere along the way. Also, if your website has a blog or how-to guides, you’ll probably want to keep writing those yourself. Generative AIs aren’t good at writing anything creative or original.

2. Scheduling and automating tasks

Google isn’t just a search engine. It’s also an email provider, a photo library, a calendar app, and more. If you need a particular task done at a particular time, automating that process is one example of how to use Gemini AI. Gemini can read your full schedule to you at the beginning of the workday, for example, or summarize all your emails after your last client appointment. You can even schedule one-off Google Tasks for the future, such as taking photos for a social media campaign or finding driving directions to a local beauty convention.

One thing Gemini AI can’t do, though, is send emails for you. If you want to automate your client scheduling, digital marketing, or appointment reminders, you’ll need a dedicated salon management platform for the job.

3. Researching new trends

The beauty industry moves fast. There’s always a new haircut, nail design, or makeup technique making the rounds on social media — and there’s always something that just went out of style. To stay on top of every recent trend, you’d have to be glued to your smartphone 24/7. Luckily, generative AIs excel at finding patterns. If you ask Google Gemini for the latest and greatest beauty innovations, it can give you an answer in seconds. You can even fine-tune your results by asking it to analyze a specific website or social media network. 

4. Training staff members

Whether you run a small storefront or an enterprise business, you’ve probably hired new staff members at some point. That means you also know how much of a pain onboarding can be. There’s a lot to learn about your business, and you probably don’t have time to teach it all yourself. If you have a Google Workspace account, you can use Gemini to make things much easier. Gemini AI can help you create onboarding documents, checklists, and training materials. Depending on how you set up your system, Gemini could even have conversations with new hires, directing them to the right resources and answering their questions.

5. Creating chatbots

Your website might already have a chatbot. These programs “talk” with clients on your website or social media page, helping them out with simple questions or scheduling requests. While chatbots can save you a lot of time and effort, some of them are pretty limited in what they can say and do. With Gemini Gems, you can create a unique chatbot for your salon — one that knows every detail about your business, and even talks like one of your staff members. Creating chatbots takes some programming skills, but Gemini makes the process much easier than it used to be.

From fleshing out your website to having full conversations with your clients, Gemini AI can do a lot for your salon. Now that we’ve covered the basics of how to use Gemini AI, the next step is to try the tools for yourself. Give it some prompts, ask it some questions, and see what kind of response you get. You might just find the next big idea for your business.