How small businesses can leverage AI

This article is from Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across industries. To receive it in your inbox,sign up here. From accounting to design to market research and product development, there’s a staggering breadth of skills needed to run a business. A large company can hire experts to handle these tasks, but small businesses don’t always have this luxury. That’s where AI comes in. Today’s AI models do a decent job at these tasks. The trick for small businesses is to understand where AI is good enough and where it’s not. One place where a “good enough” AI can already be quite valuable to small business owners is in providing secretarial skills and handling basic administrative matters. Let’s take a look at how one private tutor is using it to improve his recordkeeping and free up his time. Case study Sam Finnegan-Dehn works in fundraising for a charity, but he moonlights as a math and philosophy tutor for university students from his home in London. Through this part-time business, he can leverage his degrees in philosophy and share his love of the subject with clients. But meeting with students is only a fraction of the work it takes to be a good tutor. He also plans lessons and finds fresh reading materials, creates assignments, sends invoices, and keeps up with new research—all on top of his regular job. Given these demands, Finnegan-Dehn doesn’t have as much time as he’d like to grow his tutoring roster. So he’s turned to AI for some help in managing the day-to-day aspects of his business. He says AI has taken on a secretarial role across all of his digital notebooks, where he jots down reminders about his clients’ progress and new readings to keep himself up-to-date. He describes using AI as kind of like having a second memory that helps him connect ideas he’s written down in various places. While he has experimented with different tools like Claude and ChatGPT, he’s now landed on Notion AI because it integrates better with his tutoring notes, which live across his notebook tabs in the Notion app. Finnegan-Dehn doesn’t use AI to create teaching materials, but he does let Notion AI record meetings with his clients (after getting their consent), and then uses its automated summaries to refine his teaching strategy. For example, if he notices from the AI’s summary that it seems like a certain technique was not helping a student, he may change how he approaches the subject next time. Beyond this, Notion AI also helps him with goal-setting, drafting lesson notes, invoicing, and generating and syncing social media posts. For goal-setting, for example, Finnegan-Dehn says he understands his long-term goals for his business but not always the concrete steps to build to them. He uses AI to help fill in these gaps. He starts by writing down a “North Star” goal—say, to have a certain number of clients by the end of the year. Next, he asks his AI to generate the steps that he needs to take to get there, given the profile he has built up in the app. Then, he can reflect on the results and choose which tasks to tackle first. The tool Notion has been a big player in note-taking software for many years. Its AI add-on, released in late 2023, now has tools that enable it to interact with many other online productivity platforms. There’s an email client, calendar integrations, and a newly released agent. And while this level of access has raised privacy concerns, it can also make for a pretty powerful virtual assistant. Many of the tasks targeted by Notion AI are less creative and more rote: syncing information across documents or searching through old scribbles, for example. This makes the tool especially appealing to small business owners, who have limited bandwidth, particularly for menial work. Other companies are developing tools targeted at specific industries. For example, Grandma’s Quilt Shop in Yuma, Arizona, uses Rain, which has a software suite tailored to craft companies, to generate inventory descriptions and pricing for its stock of fabric designs. The owners claim this AI tool cuts the time it takes to list items by 60 to 80%. There are drawbacks, though, as Finnegan-Dehn described some of Notion AI’s idiosyncrasies as “clunky” at times. And the AI add-on for Notion costs $20 per month. As with all new tools, small business owners should carefully assess how the potential gains and headaches measure up against the cost of just doing the job themselves. User tips Consider these points when thinking about whether AI might be able to help you run a business, or make any part of your work life just a little bit easier.  Look before you leap. Since LLMs feed on the data you input to answer your queries or complete tasks, you want to give them information in a way that’s convenient for you and for the model. For many of these notebook AI services, this means, for example, using their platform for notetaking so you don’t have to input or upload notes later. Because of this, it’s a good idea to weigh your options carefully before committing to an AI-powered ecosystem. Work to your strengths. Think about what skills you lack in-house, and see if AI can either help with training or take these tasks on for you. Just be aware: AI hallucinates and makes mistakes, so think about where accuracy is needed and keep humans in charge there. AI isn’t always the best tool. It’s okay to use something off the shelf when that’s the better choice. It’s going to be safer, for example, to use existing payment processing platforms like Shopify or Square than to vibe-code one using AI. Consider using local models for any sensitive information. Our reporting has covered the risks that online AI models have in leaking sensitive data, and there have been many reports about how AI companies collect your data when you ask their chatbots questions. Even if your business doesn’t handle personal information, there can still be some things you’d prefer not to share publicly. In these cases, using an open-source model that makes inferences on your prompts locally can be a great option, instead of ChatGPT or Claude or other proprietary models. Thankfully, some LLMs can now be run off of laptops and small desktops. Here’s how to set one up and start using it. Sign up for Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across healthcare, climate tech, education, and more.