Small Businesses Have a Big AI Problem

You can’t avoid it these days. AI is everywhere. Heaven forbid you click on a single Reel, Story, Snap, or article and change the entire fate of your algorithms for the next few days. And while I appreciate the neat, new, next-generation AI applications, we’re still missing some pretty critical foundations for Small Business.

In Salesforce’s latest Small & Medium Business Trends Report, 75% of businesses surveyed are already investing in AI. What’s more, SMBs are focusing on Customer Experience to find new customers and retain their existing ones. This becomes a critical philosophy of their growth strategy.

So if SMBs are so bullish on their growth and AI technology fuels their tech investments right now, what’s the problem?

Data. Only 47% of SMBs feel they are VERY data-driven.

As the owner of a small business and someone who works in tech, I understand the conundrum. In a recent push to automate our Order-to-Cash process, I ran into a problem. While we were setting up our tool stack to manage intake, execution, and billing, I noted that we are inconsistent with the way we intake, process, and manage the data throughout the workflow.

You see, our focus was also on Customer Experience. Let’s make it as easy as possible for our customer to submit orders. We simply accepted their format for intake and (gasp) copy-and-pasted what we needed into Trello. Once the orders were in Trello, we (gasp, again) copy-and-pasted into a Google Sheet. This was the best, low-customer-overhead way we could come up with at the time. Now that I am automating it, I have two options:

  • Change the intake process by asking the customer to be a good foster of our data
  • Leverage AI to effectively parse what data is needed for downstream automation

 

Weighing the risks and benefits now becomes a question of Total Cost of Ownership of our technology stack. Do I invest in a low-cost AI solution that makes intake easier? Or do I have a tutorial session with our customer to change the way orders come into the system?

Let me know your thoughts.