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AI is the small business solution Rob Low can’t live without. As someone who suffers from dyslexia, he found social media posting exhausting. Getting a “quick” post online used to take him half an hour. “I just stopped bothering,” he says. Now, thanks to ChatGPT, things are different. “I can type absolute gobbledygook into the engine and it understands exactly what I’m saying,” he says.

Social media postings are just one of the many applications of AI that has enabled Low’s small business Zeepy to hit dizzying heights. Zeepy produces sleep-training products and podcasts that are in the top 5 per cent of podcasts downloads globally. None of it would be there without AI – unless Zeepy hired a team of expensive freelancers. “It’s empowered us to do a lot more stuff than we knew we were capable of,” Low says.

Zeepy is just one example of how a newly available range of AI apps are changing the way firms can do business. For many, AI is providing a competitive edge. For some, it is fundamental to the way the business operates – an opportunity to do something previously impossible. “Used well, AI has the power to transform how small businesses operate,” says Tina McKenzie, Policy Chair at the UK’s Federation of Small Businesses.

Competitive threat

There is a flip side, of course: the mere existence of these apps represents a threat to companies unwilling or unable to adapt. According to a 2024 YouGov survey, only one-third of small business leaders have even a basic understanding of AI tools. “Right now, many aren’t able to maximise AI’s potential,” McKenzie warns.

The AI-for-everyone revolution began in earnest in November 2022, when tech firm OpenAI launched ChatGPT. After multiple iterations, ChatGPT is now a hugely powerful “generative AI”, which means it can produce content – text, images, video and so on – in response to a prompt as simple as “design a flyer to promote my business”. There is a huge range of powerful AI apps on offer
now, performing tasks from developing company strategy to engaging with customers at any time of the day or night (see Box). Law firms, breweries, manufacturing businesses and skincare companies have all jumped on board.

One such app is Tidio, which offers AI-powered customer service via a chatbot. Zeepy has been using it for a while now to deal with enquiries. Law gave it access to Zeepy’s website so that it could scrape all the support articles, then trained it with the instruction manual for their products and a lot of the frequently asked questions that come in from customers. “It was about half a day’s work,” he says.

Once trained up, it took over the interactions with customers on the website. “It has reduced the number of emails we have to deal with by about 90 per cent,” Law says.

BlackShuck Distillery in Norfolk, UK, has enjoyed a similar experience. Owned and run by a husband and wife team, BlackShuck is a shop, distillery, event space and tourist destination. There’s a lot to do, and Microsoft’s Copilot AI engine is now part of the BlackShuck operation.

“We have a virtual bartender on our website that can answer customer questions 24/7,” says co-founder Sarah Saunders. Those questions might be about opening times, or the best way to drink BlackShuck’s new cherry brandy liqueur.

It has a marketing role too. “I use it to create social media posts,” Saunders says. “That’s helpful because we’re a small business and we are reliant on marketing our products through social media.”

If you’re switched on to AI, you can employ a range of apps as if you had a team of employees. Louis Watkins, the founder of Clear for Men, built his skincare business using  a diverse set of AI apps such as Shopify (for processing payments), ChatGPT (for content creation) and Boardy (for network building).

Boardy is an example of AI’s future: it is “agentic”, meaning that it operates as a standalone entity that can set its own agenda. Its creators market Boardy as a “superconnector” that operates with a vast network of founders, creators, investors and customers: always-on and always creating opportunities. “With agentic AI, you start to remove restrictions and allow for AI that can make decisions,” says Aaron Harris, chief technology officer of accounting software firm Sage, which is starting to move into  agentic AI with its accountancy and auditing software. “Now the human can move onto doing other work, knowing that the agentic AI will pull them in if needed.”

AI agents

As more agentic AIs are deployed online, they are likely to connect and collaborate with each other, creating a whole new dynamic in business practice. Last year, OpenAI chairman Sam Altmann suggested that, because of AI apps, the era of a single person running a billion-dollar company was not far off. Nothing that’s happened in the last year has dimmed that vision.

A “small business” has always been defined by the number of employees. But, with AI in the mix, there doesn’t need to be anything small about the turnover.

Read more: Meet your AI accounting assistant

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