Adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is “growing” in small businesses, according to Verizon. Salesforce says AI is driving “stronger revenue growth” in small businesses. The UD Chamber of Commerce reports that businesses are “using AI to compete and thrive” and “almost all small businesses are using an AI-powered software tool,” claims the Associated Press.
I hate to be a shame, but humble. Small businesses are not 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 type of fake news promotes brands and their content. The truth is that artificial intelligence is not “growing” in small businesses. At least not yet. It’s barely being approved. And it’s definitely not being used to automate or drive our core operations. I know this because I visit and talk with many small business owners – my clients – every month. I am also a small business owner.
We are not ignoring AI. We’ve been playing – just playing – with the AI toys we currently have. 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 think about how cheap—sorry, frugal—” we are ).We’ve posted questions and requests for these chatbots. We’ve gotten help with our emails and blogs. We’re talking to the phones and we’re getting driving directions. We’re playing around with some of the features in Microsoft Copilot.
But we are not idiots. We know that many of the answers generated by these AI platforms are wrong. We’ve all experienced outages, delays and crashes of these systems. We understand that great technology revealed many of these things ahead of time. We admire—but are a little suspicious of—the handful of entrepreneurs who claim to be using AI to start businesses, write code, and create products. And we respect those who warn us that if we don’t adopt AI, we could be in big trouble in just a few years. But despite surveys and reports like the ones mentioned above, we’re still not adopting AI. 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, trade and provide advice to their clients. Taco Bell is using AI to listen in on an employee’s conversations with customers. Walmart is creating a massive AI system to help shoppers choose products. These companies are spending millions – tens of millions – developing and training their huge language models.
Small business owners will not build large language models. They will buy them from their software vendors. These are the companies that make the accounting, human resources, inventory, order entry, time and billing, and project management applications that millions of small businesses rely on, and they’ll be rolling out new features that AI agents will use in so their customers can create better workflows and automation and get things done with fewer people.
Soon, a company as small as mine will be able to pay several thousand dollars a year for an automated chatbot system that goes to my website or resides on-premise, has access to all my data (and public data) and be able to use AI agents to answer questions about our products, generate quotes, send invoices, match payments with receivables, set up an employee THE ri, to send reminder emails, schedule service calls, and perform a number of other tasks that do not require human involvement. When this happens, I will be able to use my valuable employees to do more valuable things and eliminate those employees who are not so valuable.
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But right now? There is no way I – or any of my clients – would trust an AI app, tool or platform to do anything serious with our data. I, like most small business owners, will not hand over my business to AI bots until we are very sure that those bots actually work as promised and that our data is in good enough condition to automation was used. I, like most small business owners, still don’t trust these companies with our data.
The day will come – as it did with cloud computing and mobile apps – when most small businesses will actually use AI technology. But that time has not yet come. So when you read those surveys that say the use of artificial intelligence by small business owners is “on the rise,” know that that’s just fake news.
