(This column originally appeared in The Guardian)
Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption is “surging” at small businesses, according to Verizon. Salesforce says AI is driving “stronger revenue growth” at small businesses. The UD Chamber of Commerce reports that businesses are “leveraging AI to compete and thrive” and “almost all small businesses are using a software tool that is enabled by AI”, the Associated Press claims.
I hate to be a curmudgeon, but humbug. Small businesses aren’t using AI anywhere near these levels.
Tech companies, tech researchers and tech writers want you to believe that AI is taking over the world and that the nation’s 33 million small business owners are using AI to grow and thrive. Why? Because this kind of fake news promotes their brands and their content. The truth is that AI is not “surging” at small businesses. At least not yet. It’s barely being adopted. And it’s definitely not being used to automate or run our core operations. I know this because I visit and talk to many small business owners — my clients — every month. I’m also a small business owner.
We’re not ignoring AI. We’ve been playing — just playing — with the AI toys currently available to us. We’ve signed up for ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Perplexity or one of the other hot chatbot platforms (some of us have even paid, which is kind of a miracle when you consider how cheap — sorry, frugal — we are). We’ve been posting questions and queries and prompts to these chatbots and doing searches. We’ve been getting help with our emails and blogs. Some of us have used these platforms to draft contracts and policies. We’re talking to our phones and getting driving directions. We’re playing with some of the features in Microsoft Copilot.
But we’re not idiots. We know that a lot of the answers generated by these AI platforms are wrong. We’ve all experienced outages, delays and breakdowns of these systems. We realize that big tech rolled out a lot of this stuff prematurely. We admire — but are a little dubious- of the handful of entrepreneurs who claim they’re using AI to start businesses, write code and create products. And we are respectful of those that warn us that if we don’t adopt AI we could be in big trouble in just a few years. But, despite the surveys and reports like the ones mentioned above, we’re still not adopting AI, yet. That’s because we’re small businesses, not big brands.
Big brands are leaning heavily into AI. JPMorgan, UBS and other Wall Street firms are developing AI platforms that will perform analysis, do trades and give advice to their clients. Taco Bell is using AI to listen in on an employee’s conversations with customers. Walmart is creating a huge AI system to help shoppers choose products. These companies are spending millions — tens of millions — developing and training their own large language models.
Small business owners aren’t going to be building large language models. They’ll be buying them from their software vendors. These are the companies that make the accounting, HR, inventory, order entry, time and billing and project management applications that are relied on by those millions of small businesses and they will be rolling out new features that will leverage AI agents so that their customers can create better workflows and automation and do get things done with less people.
Soon, a company as small as mine will be able to pay a few thousand bucks a year for an automated chatbot system that goes on my website or resides internally has access to all of my data (and public data) and be able to leverage AI agents to answer questions about our products, generate quotes, send out invoices, match payments to receivables, set up a new employee, send out reminder emails, schedule service calls, and perform a number of other tasks that don’t need human involvement. When this happens, I will be able to utilize my valuable employees to do more valuable things and eliminate those employees are not so valuable.
But right now? There’s no way that I — or any of my clients — will trust an AI app, tool or platform to do anything serious with our data. I, like most small business owners, won’t be turning over my business to AI bots until we’re very confident that those bots actually work as promised and that our data is in good enough shape for automation to be used. I, like most small business owners, still don’t even trust these companies with our data.
The day will come — as it did with cloud computing and mobile apps — where most small businesses will truly be using AI technology. But that time hasn’t yet arrived. So when you read those surveys saying that small business owners’ use of AI is “surging” know that this is just fake news.
