Why Small & Medium Businesses Feel Left Behind
For many small and medium businesses, AI often feels like something happening elsewhere.
It's talked about in the context of large corporations, venture-backed startups, or companies with dedicated innovation teams. The examples are impressive β but they rarely feel relatable.
This creates a quiet assumption: "AI is powerful, but it's not for businesses like ours."
That assumption didn't come out of nowhere.
Small and medium businesses operate under very different constraints than large organizations. Limited budgets, small teams where people wear multiple hats, legacy systems that still get the job done, little or no internal IT or AI expertise β and very real consequences if something breaks.
In this environment, technology decisions are not about experimentation. They're about survival, stability, and trust.
When AI is presented as something that requires massive change, new teams, or months of disruption, it immediately feels out of reach β and rightly so.
From "Big AI" to Practical AI
There's an important difference between big AI initiatives and practical AI use.
Big AI tries to transform everything at once. Practical AI focuses on one problem at a time.
Helping employees find answers faster. Reducing manual data entry. Catching errors before they become costly.
These are not revolutionary ideas β they're supportive ones.
And they're far more aligned with how small and medium businesses operate.