What Small Business Owners Should Learn as AI Changes Entrepreneurship

We’re well into the AI revolution now, and it looks like there’s no turning back. AI is here, and it’s getting better with each passing day. Every day, you hear of different industries pouring billions of dollars into AI investments to be among the first to reap the benefits. If you’re an entrepreneur or a small business owner, this is a good time to start considering how you can use AI as well.

According to a report by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, 77% of small business owners plan to start adopting AI. Furthermore, 91% of businesses state that AI is going to help them with their business growth goals.

Right now, AI is primarily being used just for single-task automation, but that’s just a tiny spectrum of what’s possible. In this article, let’s explore how AI can actually offer real and tangible QOL improvements to your operations and how to prepare for them.

This sounds awfully similar to the oft-repeated ‘automation’ mantra, but it’s a little different. So, as an entrepreneur, you might be aware of how long and messy the road to success can be. There’s always a hundred different tasks that you need to worry about. Drafting pitches, finding potential investors and funding sources, all in addition to the logistics of your own niche.

This is definitely one area where AI is changing the game. It’s making it easier for people without mentors to have a fighting chance of competing. While you can use the enterprise model of ChatGPT, you don’t have to limit yourself to it. You can even look into hosting local instances of other models as well.

It’s much easier to handle certain tasks this way, especially if you don’t want to be giving your data to OpenAI. Gene Marks, a small business owner and columnist for The Guardian, notes that privacy is one of the key reasons for hesitation in AI adoption. He states that there’s ‘no way’ he or any of his clients would trust AI with anything serious that involves their data.

When you run local models, you still get to enjoy the usual benefits but without the loss of data privacy. Of course, you’ll want to supervise the process because AI still makes mistakes every now and then.

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As we mentioned in the previous point, AI is making it easier for new businesses to compete and hold their ground. For instance, a key advantage that established companies had was access to expert consultants and data analysts. As a young entrepreneur, it’s rather hard to make good decisions when your competition has a team of McKinsey consultants at hand.

Let’s be clear, though: AI won’t replace all of that, but it closes the gap enough that small businesses have a better chance. Not only does it make data analytics far more accessible, but even basic business needs, such as building a company website, are far easier now.

So many entrepreneurs are in fields that are far removed from tech. These people may not be the most tech-savvy and often get scammed thousands of dollars during the website creation process. However, as Hocoos notes, websites can now be built in a matter of minutes after answering a few simple questions.

Building websites might seem like a rather insignificant capability of AI, but you have to view it from the perspective of an inexperienced entrepreneur. Having a good website is just one out of many ‘tiny’ challenges that exist. AI might not be solving the biggest problems for you yet, but it sure makes it much easier to handle the rest.

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Right now, most businesses that use AI do so as a direct service. If a business needs articles created, they use ChatGPT. If there’s a requirement for data analysis, then a specific AL or ML tool is used for it. As you can imagine, this doesn’t really change much. All it does is replace the work of a typical worker with an AI tool.

The real change that you should be positioning yourself for is AI managed by AI. This is when you actually unlock a new kind of workflow that can execute different tasks and synchronize them toward a specific purpose. China’s new Manus model seems to be heading in this direction.

So if you’re trying to do digital marketing, everything from market research to SEO, content creation, and publication could be handled by AI. If done the right way, it might even be possible to run multiple small businesses from the sheer efficiency that AI-managed workflows unlock.

Of course, as Gartner notes, we still need to have oversight. They point out that by 2028, 40% of CIOs will require ‘guardian agents’ to oversee and contain the actions of AI agents.

All things considered, there’s a lot that you, small businesses, can do to prepare for the AI revolution that is underway. You just have to be ready to learn because this is uncharted territory. If history has taught us anything, it’s that pioneers and first adopters are rewarded greatly.