The Big Advantage in Small Business Remains Largely Untapped

A small shop in Naperville can sign up for most of the same AI tools the Fortune 500 uses, often the same week it hears about them. No procurement review, no committee. That's a real advantage, and from what the data shows, most small businesses haven't cashed it in yet. What the big company usually has, and the small one usually doesn't, is a group of people whose whole job is figuring out where those tools belong in the work.

You can see that gap in the Federal Reserve's latest Small Business Credit Survey. Nearly half of employer firms, 46%, said the business or its employees were using AI. About half of those users described themselves as still experimenting, and only 7% said AI was fully built into how the business runs. Among firms planning to start, the most common challenge was finding or adapting tools to fit the business, cited by 54%.

Then there are the owners who've passed on it. Of the firms with no plans to use AI, 56% told the Fed it isn't applicable to their business. Census researchers, looking at similar answers in their own survey, called it a "perceptual lag," suggesting the technology can do more than many owners have had a chance to see.

My guess is that in a lot of businesses, nobody has sat down and walked through the actual work with the owner yet.

I don't blame anyone for being skeptical, because plenty of AI pitches are noise. It's also why I say AI isn't the product, I am. The useful part is learning how work really moves through a business and then putting AI into the specific spots where it makes the business easier to run.

If you've been stuck at the experimenting stage, I'd be glad to talk it through.

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