Small businesses may decide AI’s next chapter

AI was pitched as a way to level the playing field, but so far it has largely widened the gap between enterprises and small businesses. In a TechRadar Pro Perspectives column, the Founder & CEO at Emergent argues that while 72% of small business owners in the US see AI as a way to support staff and improve efficiency, most products still target enterprise budgets, infrastructure, and onboarding processes.

That mismatch, the piece argues, is as much a design problem as a pricing one. Small teams often lack technical staff, formal systems, and spare time, which makes enterprise-style AI hard to adopt even when the potential upside is significant.

For founders, the biggest drain is often routine work: outreach, follow-ups, meeting prep, and other administrative tasks that consume time better spent on customers and growth. The article says AI is now moving beyond drafting and summarizing into handling multi-step workflows with less supervision, shifting from assistant to something closer to a teammate that owns part of the workload.

That raises the standard for AI tools. Output quality still matters, but for small businesses, reliability and low-friction adoption matter more. A tool that creates extra oversight or complexity, the author writes, will not save time — it will create resentment.

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The column argues the next wave of winners will be platforms built specifically for how small teams actually operate: messy, improvised, and short on technical resources. Trust is also a barrier, especially for owners who have already used software that overpromised and underdelivered. Transparency about what AI is doing, and why, is essential.

The core claim is simple: enterprises had the budgets, engineers, and time to get a head start on AI. The larger opportunity now is closing that gap for smaller companies and giving them tools that work on day one.