Every day brings new headlines about AI — financial shifts, social debates, intellectual property battles and practical use cases. Yet, despite its ubiquity, it remains one of the most underreported subjects in today’s news cycle.
Over the past three weeks, I’ve dedicated nearly 20 hours to classes and conferences, exploring AI applications, prompt engineering and ways to measure ROI. It’s overwhelming, exciting and scary at the same time. This technology, that is improving daily, is reshaping the way we live and work. It is hard to think of another technology in history that portends disruption as vast as AI. The internet? Electricity? The control of fire by early humans? Technology is moving so fast that we can’t begin to predict the changes that will happen two years from now, let alone in a decade. What we do know is that change is inevitable.
Dr. Justin Wolfers, an Economics and Public Policy professor at the University of Michigan, recently predicted that white-collar professionals could soon face the same kind of shake-up that hit blue-collar workers and farmers during the automation boom of the 1980s. It isn’t a stretch to imagine professions that rely on an expertise that includes interpretation, pattern recognition, applied knowledge, research or forecasting will be affected, devalued and in some cases largely eliminated.
But every crisis brings opportunity, and AI creates massive opportunities, especially for small businesses.
Small businesspeople are accustomed to doing more with less. Leaders are often handling sales, keeping the company books, managing administrative processes, directing staff or all the above. We are conditioned to wear multiple hats, and employees are often departments of one. We know that it’s impossible to work on your business if you’re working in it. But for many small business leaders, this is reality. Scaling is difficult not just because of the cost. It’s the time it takes to create job descriptions, reinvent workflows, interview, hire, onboard and train. Time is what you need most and have the least.
This is where AI makes the difference, and why it matters most for small businesses. If AI productivity apps replicate adding an additional person to your team, and you’re a department of one, you’ve increased productivity by 100 percent. For small businesses, this technology isn’t just saving us time, it’s creating more of it.
Beyond productivity increases, AI creates a democratization of expertise. Market research, financial analysis and forecasting, product development, content creation, SEO optimization are just a few of the things that small businesses typically outsource and pay others for, if they did it all. The gains smaller companies can realize with this access are immense.
These tools are impressive but also imperfect. The quality and accuracy of what ChatGPT or CoPilot spit out can be dubious. There are real security and privacy concerns about the use of Agentic AI. There is yet to be regulation and the arrival of actual AGI and SGI is just a matter of time. The wealthiest people are heavily invested in AI, so ownership and control are concerns, as is intellectual property. There is a lot to contend with, and a legion of other implications to be considered.
When automation and mechanization contributed to job losses and the rise of wage inequality in the 80s, it was viewed as the price of progress. But AI is changing the landscape. Understanding and utilizing these tools will enable small businesses to scale like never before, and that’s progress. Others will have to adapt, because understanding and utilizing AI to their benefit will be critical to survival. ●
Jennifer Ake-Marriott is Owner and CEO of Redmond Waltz
