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Small-business owners are planning to spend tens of thousands of dollars on digital tools in the next year — and that includes AI software.
A new survey of 1,000 businesses with up to 200 employees by Intuit Quickbooks found business owners were expecting to spend between $45,000 and $142,000 on digital tools over the next 12 months, with about 73% of those respondents saying they are prioritizing tools such as artificial intelligence and e-commerce.
“The number one question I am asked by our customers is, ‘How do I ensure the success of my business?’” said Kelly Vincent, vice president of mid-market segment and product at Intuit. “The short answer is, know where to invest. If ever there was a time to tune in and understand how AI and technology can unlock prosperity for your business, it’s now."
While many small-business owners are anxious to use AI to cut labor costs, the survey found they are often using it with another focus: saving time.
Ultimately, small-business owners are hoping to automate their most time-consuming tasks, including expense management, invoicing and payroll. Their plan is to use the time saved to develop customer relationships and develop new products or services, the survey found.
Vincent said AI can reduce operational burdens and level the playing field for small businesses, and the explosive growth of AI tools comes at a time when those companies are grappling with a host of other challenges.
AI carries risks and rewards
Generative AI technology essentially uses a massive bank of text and phrases scraped from across the internet to predict the words that would follow a question or prompt. From there, it can generate coherent responses, although not always the correct ones — leading to what some experts have dubbed "hallucinations." Other AI tools can generate images, analyze data or create visualizations.
Open AI's ChatGPT, while taking the stage by storm in recent months, has also made news with its inability to separate fact from fiction. Recently, a pair of New York attorneys reportedly filed a legal brief from a chatbot that cited fake cases — and now face potential sanctions. Separately, a judge in Texas issued a requirement recently for lawyers to certify to him they did not use AI to draft their filings without having a human check for accuracy.
Another person is suing the company behind ChatGPT for libel for false information generated for a report, saying that every statement about him by the AI tool is false. Experts have dubbed these false outputs “hallucinations.” Critics have said many of these tools are just predicting which words follow the others and are not able to determine accuracy.
Interest in AI is high
According to a survey commissioned by Microsoft Corp. and conducted by Wakefield Research, almost half (47%) of business owners of companies with fewer than 25 employees feel that AI could be a valuable asset for their business. Among the 10% of those business owners who consider themselves AI experts, 88% said the technology would be valuable to them.
Additionally, 56% of the respondents said AI solutions could help them make their businesses more efficient, could help them analyze customer data and trends, and could automate repetitive tasks like order tracking and customer service.
Overall, business owners are keen to learn more. According to the survey, 79% of the business owners want to learn more about how they could use AI for their companies.
A separate survey by GoDaddy also found a high level of interest among business owners for AI tools, especially for managing tedious, time-consuming tasks. There was, however, a generational divide detected in that survey.
While 63% of Gen Z small-business owners said they have used AI for business or personal purposes, 83% of baby boomers said they have not yet tried it.
"Small business entrepreneurs are quickly finding that generative AI is already really well-equipped to assist them with the tasks they find most difficult to tackle, either because they don't have the time or require skills outside their wheelhouse," said Gourav Pani, GoDaddy U.S. Independents president, in comments released with the survey results. "And the better news is the AI tools are generating more effective results every day."
Here are some of the ways AI tools, including ChatGPT, can help or hinder your workforce.
Many workers are already using AI tools at work but simply not telling their managers. A survey of 3,000 American workers by human-resources company Checkr found 69% of workers say they are afraid to tell their managers they use AI tools at work for fear of one day being replaced by those same tools.
At the same time, workers are feeling pressure from managers to adopt AI tools. About 79% of American workers say their managers want them to use the tools more at work, and the rise of ChatGPT is already been seen in job listings.
