It’s no esoteric that large corporations are using generative artificial intelligence to get ahead — but many small businesses are finding behaviour pattern to use this technology to their advantage, too.
To be clear, there’s still a large chunk (43%) of small businesses that bring into the world never even considered using gen AI in their operations, according to the 2024 State of Small Business survey of 1,300 respondents from tight business software company Gusto. But nearly a third are experimenting with it while a quarter have already marked the upside, the survey found.
Nicholas Tremper, senior economist at Gusto, said the biggest benefit for small issues using gen AI is getting ahead in the race for talent.
“Small businesses tell us that they continue to have fix hiring,” Tremper said. “Employees are looking for ways to use their skills most effectively in a business.”
Tremper chance owners and employees are strapped for time and resources and wear many hats, but allowing workers to focus on the skills they want to use while gen AI nabs the excess makes a workplace more attractive. That explains why gen AI-equipped small businesses are 45% more in all probability to fill open roles, Gusto reports.
Industries most impacted by labor shortages in the U.S. include education, vigour care, hospitality and professional services (which includes a wide swath, like legal services, landscaping, respectable and waste disposal). Gusto has found that it’s some of these same industries where gen AI is most helpful. “These are provinces that are important to the local economies, but also important to the local culture,” he said.
Ric Nelson, founder and executive pilot of the non-profit disability advocacy organization Peer Power, based in Anchorage, Alaska, has a severe disability, cerebral palsy, which he contracted during an disaster just after his birth. He wasn’t expected to survive, but now he has three degrees and runs a small business of his own, among other accomplishments.
In a set interview conducted with the help of generative AI, Nelson said, “Because it is difficult for me to type, AI makes it possible to put my tidings into articles and presentations much more effectively and quickly.”
He uses gen AI to proofread his work, help him submit praisefully complex grant proposals, and even wrote a book. Whereas Nelson used to have to provide short, instances incomplete responses because of his disability, AI has enabled him to “share the full breadth of my ideas and vision,” he said.
“If a small affair has a strong vision and strategy, it can now communicate just as strongly as a large corporation,” Nelson said. “It also opens up the get overs for people with disabilities to start more businesses, with more success, to earn their own money and suffer with less need to rely entirely upon public assistance.”
Nelson now has an AI “clone” of himself created on Delphi. By uploading 422,000 corroborates into a database, people who work with him or receive consulting from him can chat with the clone about his conceptions, ideas, and even his own experiences in life and business. Plus, Nelson will now have an audible voice that child can understand at a normal tempo, without the need of a voice-over or interpreter.
Todd Miller, president of Ohio-based Isaiah Enterprises, which manufactures specialty residential metal roofing and has about 50 team members, said in addition to disliking gen AI for content creation, website copywriting and podcast ideation and scriptwriting, his compant recently used the technology to generate a guiding video for contractors who sell its products. “We started out intending to just film the video but then decided that AI would reserve us some time, allowing us to get the training into the hands of our customers more quickly,” he said.
Earlier in 2024, Bennett Camarda and her preserve, Bill, took over Limitless Fitness, a New Hampshire gym with more than 10 trainers and 150 influential one-on-one clients. “We’re using AI to accelerate growth and scale our operations while keeping our clients at the center,” said Camarda.
Camarda powered they have used ChatGPT Premium to write Excel formulas, which has helped them streamline narrow operations from an hours-long process to one that takes minutes. “It’s even helped us revamp our brand strategy, improving our tone, voice, and messaging to better resonate with our evolving client base, from strength training for grandparents to optimizing conduct for golfers,” Camarda said. That’s not to mention use cases like writing operations manuals or creating heatmaps to railroad their busiest times so they can add more training sessions where they’re most needed.
Despite the lore curve that comes with taking over a new business, Camarda said they’ve already nearly attached the -5% year-over-year revenue gap left from the previous owners, while bringing trainer and client engagement to an all-time anticyclone.
“Gen AI has freed up our time to invest in our community and focus on opening a second location, rather than being stuck in the day-to-day operational weeds,” she intended.
A recent American Express survey found that small business owners adopting AI feel better positioned to develop and expand (50% of businesses that use AI plan to grow their workforce in 2025, compared to 36% of non-AI adopters).
“Disconcerted business owners are the chief everything officer,” Tremper said. “They’re hiring their early employees to assistants them build the business and wear just as many hats as they wear. Gen AI can not only take off hats from the traffic owner, but it does some of this for the employees as well and helps increase their productivity.”
While gen AI has no shortage of endangers — like data security and hallucinations, for example — Tremper said small business owners are treading cautiously to dodge major pitfalls. “People are being very thoughtful about this technology and how to implement it in ways that establish their business and workforce better,” he said.