For the better part of two years, the national conversation about artificial intelligence has been dominated by the largest technology companies, the researchers building the underlying models, and the policymakers trying to write the rules for them. But what is largely missing from the discussion is the segment of the American economy where the day-to-day impact of these tools will be felt first and most directly: small businesses.
Small businesses, the roughly 33 million firms that account for nearly half of private sector employment, are the place where AI will either become a unifying force for economic prosperity or create a widening gap in equality. This outcome will be shaped by the choices made over the next several years about access, training, and support.
Rhett Buttle, founder and CEO of Public Private Strategies and president of the Public Private Strategies Institute, has spent his career at the intersection of policy and the private sector. He argues that small businesses are not bystanders in the AI story, but some of its most promising potential beneficiaries.
The Numbers Behind the Argument
The early data is encouraging. Roughly a third of American small businesses report that they are already experimenting with AI in some form, whether through customer service tools, marketing automation, bookkeeping software, or content generation. Their experience also seems to be largely positive. Owners describe saved time, faster customer responses, marketing that is easier to sustain, and the ability to take on work that previously required hiring help they could not afford.
However, two-thirds of small businesses have not yet engaged with these tools in a meaningful way. Some owners lack the time, others lack the technical confidence, and many have not yet found a tool that fits well with their business. Yet a common theme in all of these reasons is the need for a trusted source to point them toward the tools that would actually be useful for what they do.
This is the part of the story Buttle keeps coming back to. The risk is not that small businesses will be displaced by AI, but that the businesses already using AI will pull further ahead of the businesses that have not yet started.
Why Small Businesses Are Well-Positioned
In some ways, small businesses are better positioned to benefit from AI than larger firms because it is easier for them to implement the technology. Large companies have to integrate AI through a complex process that involves many systems, teams, and compliance considerations. In many cases, the time from deciding to adopt new AI software to deploying it can be measured in quarters or years. Small businesses, by contrast, can adopt a new tool in an afternoon. An owner who decides on Monday that an AI-powered scheduling tool would help her bakery can be using it by Tuesday. The barrier is simply awareness and confidence.
That structural advantage means small businesses can adapt faster, abandon what does not work, and double down on what does. The firms that figure this out early tend to do so by trial rather than by strategic plan, which is how small businesses have always adopted new tools.
We saw this play out with e-commerce. When small businesses began adopting websites in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the firms that engaged early found themselves with a meaningful advantage over the firms that waited. The same pattern played out with social media in the 2010s, with mobile payments shortly after. Each wave produced a gap between adopters and non-adopters, and each wave eventually closed as the technology became standard. AI is on a similar trajectory, with one important difference: the productivity gains compound faster.
The Coordination Problem
From Buttle’s perspective, the challenge is not the technology itself. It is the coordination required to make sure the tools actually reach the businesses that would benefit from them. This is where the public and private sectors have a meaningful role to play.
There are already federal and state small business support programs that are well positioned to help on the awareness side. The Small Business Administration’s network of resource partners, including Small Business Development Centers and SCORE chapters, reaches millions of business owners every year. Adding clear, vendor-neutral AI guidance to that work is feasible and will benefit countless small businesses.
In the private sector, technology companies that build for small businesses have an interest in making their tools genuinely accessible, not just available. That means pricing that works for a five-person firm, onboarding that does not assume a technical background, and support that respects the time constraints of an owner who is also the person opening the store in the morning. The companies that get this right will likely have long-term customers in a part of the economy that, as a whole, is larger than most enterprise markets.
Philanthropy and civil society have a third role. Industry associations, chambers of commerce, and community-based organizations are often the most trusted source of practical guidance for small business owners. There is an opportunity to equip those organizations with the resources to offer real AI literacy programs to their members.
Public Private Strategies has been organized, in part, around exactly this kind of coordinated work. The Small Business Roundtable, which Buttle helped build, brings together organizations representing small business owners across industries, regions, and backgrounds. In addition, the Next Gen Chamber of Commerce, which he founded, is built around the priorities of a new generation of business leaders who are often the first in their networks to experiment with new tools. The bottom line is that the infrastructure to move quickly on AI literacy exists. The question is whether it gets used.
A Realistic Read on the Risks
AI adoption at the small business level also brings real questions about data privacy, about reliability, and about the quality of the outputs these tools produce. Owners who deploy AI in customer-facing contexts need to understand what the technology can and cannot do, along with clear guidance on how to use it responsibly.
Buttle’s argument is that these challenges are manageable when they are addressed deliberately. The country has navigated technology transitions in the small business segment before. The pattern that tends to work is a combination of clear policy frameworks, accessible private sector products, and trusted community-level guidance. These pieces are available. They just need to be put together.
An Opportunity Worth Building Toward
If the country gets this right, the next several years could produce one of the most significant productivity gains the small business community has seen in a generation. Owners who once spent their evenings on bookkeeping will get those hours back. Firms that could not previously afford marketing will have access to it. Customer service that used to drop off at 5 p.m. will be available around the clock. None of this is hypothetical. It is already happening at the firms that have started using AI.
The question is how widely the benefit gets distributed. Rhett Buttle’s argument, consistent across his work, is that broad-based participation in this kind of transition does not happen by default. It happens when the public and private sectors are willing to design for it together.
"Entrepreneurship is the basis for everything we do," Buttle has said of his own organization. Applied to the AI moment, the line points toward a specific responsibility: making sure the tools of the next economy reach the entrepreneurs who will use them best. That is the goal, and it is one of the more promising opportunities of the decade.
