America’s small business owners have never needed convincing to try something new. It’s in our entrepreneurial DNA to step out of the status quo into something cutting-edge that larger, more hesitant corporations treat as too risky. That is even more likely if it saves us time and money.
We saw it during the COVID-19 shutdown. When storefronts closed overnight, entrepreneurs who’d never explored e-commerce platforms moved quickly under pressure to survive. An analysis of the U.S. Census Bureau Small Business Pulse Survey found nearly a quarter of small businesses increased their use of online sales platforms during the pandemic’s early months. Small businesses’ early adoption of technology was part of a broader shift that helped drive a 43% surge in U.S. e-commerce sales in 2020 alone, according to the Bureau’s Annual Retail Trade Survey.
Boutique owners who once relied on foot traffic built online platforms overnight, shipping to customers they’d never met. What defined those businesses through the shutdown wasn’t caution — it was their willingness to adapt, learn new tools, and meet customers where they were.
That same boldness is being tested again, this time by AI. Small businesses are closing the AI adoption gap with large enterprises faster than any prior technology cycle, the U.S. Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy reports, and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce finds generative AI use among small businesses has climbed to 58%, up from just 23% two years earlier.
The adoption rates may grab the headline, but the more useful story is how these firms are using what Keith Hall, president and CEO of the National Association for the Self-Employed, recently called the “biggest small business opportunity in a generation.”
As owners of a consulting firm staffed exclusively at the senior level, without junior associates doing the administrative work, it’s a question we ask ourselves every day, as do many of the small businesses, associations, and nonprofits we represent. After a year and a half pushing AI to be a force multiplier, we’ve learned some useful lessons about where it can, and where it shouldn’t, be utilized.
Here’s what we have learned:
The daily administrative work of keeping a business running. When it comes to coordinating calendars, providing first drafts of emails and social posts, or taking and summarizing meeting notes, we’ve found AI to be a powerful coworking tool. It can turn an hour-long client call into a structured summary of decisions made, next steps and who owns them in just minutes. Small organizations rarely have a chief of staff, but if used well, AI bridges that gap.
Monitoring, tracking, and analysis of a client project. As a public relations firm, we’ve used AI to track a client’s event for media placements and build a full analysis of the value and impact it delivered.
When another client was weighing a public announcement and needed a read on where the narrative was heading, we scanned the coverage and mapped which storylines were dominant and which weren’t gaining traction, a strategic read-out that used to mean flipping through articles by hand or perusing dozens of internet sites.
Streamlining accounting and financial operations for better insight. Expense categorization, invoice drafting, receivables tracking, and quick scenario modeling on what a new hire or client does to your margin all give owners a clearer read on the health of the business. None of it replaces your accountant, instead it means handing them cleaner books and better questions.
Mountains of member and stakeholder materials transformed into digestible amounts. For membership organizations and associations, the volume can be relentless, whether it be weekly updates, newsletters, or board summaries. AI can produce a solid first draft from source material, in your established format and voice, in the time it used to take to open the file and stare at it.
From idea generation to first drafts of persuasive content. Human creativity should never be outsourced, but AI makes a useful idea generator, research assistant, drafting partner and copy editor. From op-eds and client blog posts to our own new-business pitch decks, it has helped us quickly turn a client’s raw material into a polished case study for prospective partners.
Let’s be clear, AI will never be who a client calls to talk about the work the business produces. The human touch must stay at the center of a small business’s operations. Owners need to be connected enough to their audience that they never trade it away for something faster but less true to who they are.
AI may produce drafts, but humans author, check, and remain accountable for quality. It is exceptionally good at producing text that’s plausible but not always accurate, which is why a human stays the final authority on everything we ship. Strategy and framing are set by us before AI ever enters the process, every fact and quote is verified against a source, and the judgment calls around what to say, when, to whom, and what to leave unsaid, stay with the people responsible for the outcome.
That’s what we mean by our firm’s SmartPowered branding: using senior judgment before, during and after the use of AI. The firms pulling ahead aren’t spending the most on tools. They’ve decided, like us, which work the machine does and which it doesn’t.
Small business owners didn’t hand their businesses over to a delivery app during COVID-19, instead they used those tools to do what they already did best, just faster and more efficiently. AI asks the same of us now. It’s not a replacement for the judgment, relationships, and craft that built our businesses. It’s just another tool, and in the right hands, a powerful force multiplier.
Brad Luna and Kristofer Eisenla are co-founders of LUNA+EISENLA, an executive-level communications firm founded in 2012.
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