Small businesses with big ambitions are turning to artificial intelligence (AI) to drive growth. That’s because, with 2024’s National Small Business Week already on day two, the ways in which embracing next-generation innovations can help their businesses drive competitiveness, become more efficient and make better decisions is top of mind for America’s 33 million small businesses. While AI tools are still fairly new, their future possibilities and applications are nearly endless — with most firms only scratching the surface of AI’s potential impact across their operations. After all, the historically fragmented small business landscape is far from homogenous — a reality that has continually frustrated service providers, lenders and other firms looking to support at scale the businesses at the heart of our domestic economy. But that varied nature also represents a backdrop where the agility of AI can shine and have an impact. Enhancing customer service, streamlining productivity, strengthening data intelligence and real-time analysis, democratizing access to working capital and jumpstarting marketing and content creation are all ways in which AI has already started to impact the growth prospects of small businesses. While the biggest names in AI, such as Meta, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, OpenAI and more, are increasingly targeting enterprise organizations with their products; many are bringing to market AI solutions geared toward smaller firms as well. As reported here, Microsoft last week (April 23) introduced its smallest AI model yet, aimed at businesses with limited resources. “Small language models have a lower probability of hallucinations, require less data (and less preprocessing), and are easier to integrate into enterprise legacy workflows,” Narayana Pappu, CEO at Zendata, a provider of data security and privacy compliance solutions, told PYMNTS. “Most companies keep 90% of their data private and don’t have enough resources to train large language models.”
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