Three Ways Small Businesses Can Approach AI

For many small businesses, AI feels both important and frustratingly vague.

Owners and managers hear constantly about what AI is capable of. They see demonstrations, read headlines, and watch larger companies invest heavily in it. But the practical question is much harder:

How do we actually figure out where AI fits in our business?

For a small business, that usually requires bringing together three things:

Knowledge of the business. Knowledge of AI. The ability to implement.

The problem is that those three things rarely exist in the same place.

Broadly, I think small businesses have three ways to approach the problem.

1. Figure it out internally

The first option is to learn about AI yourself and look for opportunities inside the business.

This approach has one major advantage: you know your business better than anyone else.

You know which processes are inefficient, what employees spend too much time doing, where customers get frustrated, and which tasks have always been harder than they should be. An outside person may need weeks of conversations just to uncover things that are obvious to you.

The challenge is AI knowledge.

Someone inside the company has to understand enough about what AI can do to connect those business problems with possible solutions. Then someone has to actually build, configure, integrate, and maintain whatever you decide to use.

For a 20-, 50-, or even 100-person company, that can be difficult. There may not be anyone whose job it is to experiment with AI, and the people capable of doing it usually already have plenty of other responsibilities.

Advantages: Deep knowledge of your own business, greater flexibility and control, and the potential to create something highly specific to the way you operate.

Tradeoffs: Requires time, curiosity, AI knowledge, technical ability, and someone willing to own the project through implementation.

2. Bring in outside AI expertise

The second approach is to hire someone to help.

A good consultant or outside firm can bring something most small businesses don’t have internally: a broader understanding of what AI can currently do.

They may have seen similar problems in other companies and can help identify opportunities you wouldn’t have recognized yourself.

But the knowledge imbalance works in the opposite direction.

They understand AI. You understand your business.

So a significant part of the process becomes transferring enough knowledge about your company to the outside firm for them to make useful recommendations.

There is also an important distinction between identifying an opportunity and implementing it.

It is relatively easy to produce a list of ideas for how a company might use AI. It is much harder to redesign a workflow, connect systems, train employees, handle security concerns, and make the new process actually work every day.

That doesn’t make consulting a bad approach. It just means businesses should understand what they’re buying. A strategy report and a working solution are very different things.

Advantages: Access to AI expertise, outside perspective, and potentially much faster identification of useful opportunities.

Tradeoffs: Cost, the time required to teach someone your business, and the possibility that implementation becomes a much larger project than identifying the idea.

3. Use something someone else has already figured out

The third path is increasingly interesting: use a packaged AI-enabled product or service.

This could be entirely new software, an AI-enabled service, or simply a new capability inside software you already use.

In this case, someone else has already done much of the work.

They identified a specific problem. They determined how AI could help solve it. And, importantly, they built a product or service you can evaluate. You still have to check its fit, data handling, integrations, and implementation requirements.

Instead of asking:

“How could we use AI to solve this?”

you’re asking:

“Is this already-solved problem important to our business?”

That’s a very different question.

Imagine a product built specifically to automate one narrow accounting, customer service, sales, legal, or administrative workflow. The company behind it doesn’t need to understand everything about your organization. It needs to understand that particular problem extremely well.

If the problem matches yours and the product works as claimed, much of the difficult AI work may already have been done.

Potential advantages: Faster adoption, easier implementation, lower internal expertise requirements, and lower cost than building something custom, depending on the product and workflow.

Tradeoffs: Less customization and control. You’re largely accepting someone else’s definition of the problem and their way of solving it. And, of course, the solution is only valuable if the problem it solves is actually important to your business.

There isn’t a universally right answer

These three approaches aren’t mutually exclusive.

A company might use packaged AI tools for several straightforward functions, work internally on something unique to its business, and bring in outside expertise for a particularly complicated opportunity.

And each approach involves tradeoffs.

The table is a rough comparison, not a promise about any particular project. Integration, sensitive data, and unusual workflows can change the cost and effort.

Approach	Business Knowledge	AI Knowledge	Implementation Effort	Customization	Typical Speed
1. Figure it out internally	High	Must develop internally	High	High	Slower
2. Bring in outside expertise	Must be transferred	High	Medium to high	High	Medium
3. Use a packaged solution	Needed mainly to judge fit	Built into the solution	Lower	Lower	Faster

The ideal situation would be someone who understands your company deeply, understands the rapidly changing capabilities of AI, and can implement the solution economically.

For most small businesses, that person or team doesn’t exist.

So the more useful question may not be:

“What should our AI strategy be?”

It may be:

“Which parts of this do we want to figure out ourselves, which parts should we get help with, and which problems has someone else already solved for us?”

For many small businesses, answering that question is probably a much more practical place to start.