AI Accelerating Small Businesses

For the last couple years, amid all the conversations about AI taking away jobs, I’ve been mainly thinking about all the work that AI makes possible that simply wasn’t being done before.

Working primarily with small businesses, I constantly see jobs that could be done, but simply aren’t, due to a lack of time or resources, or the perception that it’s too complex.

That’s certainly why, like I showed last week, a third of small businesses in some areas don’t have a website, and most don’t keep their websites up-to-date.

But AI tools have already greatly simplified what it takes to effectively launch and run a business. Now it’s just a matter of more entrepreneurs realizing it.

Yesterday I published a case study about a new website I built for Lancers Diner in Horsham, PA, that helps illustrate the point.

Only a year ago, redoing a site like this would’ve been a lot of manual labor. It was an outdated Wordpress site that required a complete rebuild, along with a comprehensive menu update. It’s a diner, so that meant hundreds of items.

In the past, this would’ve meant a couple months of planning and work, and cost at least several grand.

Using the latest tools, I not only completely finished it in a day’s worth of work, but made a bunch of improvements that would’ve been complicated or impossible using traditional web builders like Squarespace, Wix and Wordpress.

Does that mean AI’s going to eliminate web designer jobs? I don’t think so. AI was able to do all the stuff that needed to get done but wasn’t really design at all, like taking a PDF of the current menu and recreating all the items with the same descriptions and pricing.

With that grunt work done quickly, I was able to focus more on the look, experience, and content.

That’s my bullish outlook on how AI impacts small businesses. Technology stops becoming such a hurdle. Businesses can then win on their merits, focusing more attention on providing great service and telling their story.