Tuesday, 1 May 2018

Small Business in the Age of AI

Intuit released a new study, Small Business in the Age of A.I., which found small businesses are bullish on automation technology and are already leveraging it to manage and grow their businesses.

A key study finding is despite all the noise about A.I. and other forms of automation technology disrupting industries and destroying jobs, most small businesses see automation technology as creating opportunities for both their businesses and employees.

As the study chart below shows (click to enlarge), very few (only about 6%) of the SMB's surveyed see automation technology, including A.I., as a threat to their business today or in the next 5 years.

Intuit smb automation

Other findings include:

  • Very few small businesses think that automation technology will lead to job losses. In fact, 31% say automation will allow them to add employees, while 59% say there will be no difference, and only 1% say there will be significant job loses.
  • Small businesses are adopting the leading edge of automation technology. The top categories are big data (24%), natural language processing (17%), and machine learning (12%).
  • Despite positive attitudes toward automation, a significant number of small business are not set up to take advantage of it. Almost 1 in 5 small business are not using the cloud to run their business, a necessary first step to taking advantage of the benefits of most automation software and systems
  • The top three benefits existing users of automation technology see are: freeing up time to get more work done (79%), helping with customer service (77%), boosting innovation (74%).

Intuit partnered with Emergent Research (that's us) on this study, which is part of a deeper dive research project on how automation technologies are impacting small businesses.

We'll have more from this study in the near future.



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