I chat to small business owners all the time about how AI could shake up their businesses. Most of them either don’t really care or just don’t think it’ll make much difference to what they do.
I get why. Coming from a coding background, we were the first to feel the impact. Where I used to need 14 developers, now I only need 10 – thanks to AI.
But now it’s spreading everywhere. In the past year, companies like Klarna and Verizon have laid off loads of people in customer service and support. It’s happening in HR, admin, content writing, marketing, finance and even legal jobs.
I really believe this isn’t just limited to those areas. It’s only a matter of time before AI starts to affect pretty much every bit of human knowledge. Citrine Research’s article “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” https://www.citriniresearch.com/p/2028gic (with plenty of critics who say it’s unlikely) makes the point that AI is a massive shock to the global economy – because intelligence, which used to make us special, is now shared with machines, and that makes it just another commodity.
So, what can a small business owner do to keep ahead of the curve?
As I’ve said before, it’s the deep knowledge and experience that make your business stand out and help you ride out the changes AI brings. Your know-how, your relationships with customers, and your unique way of doing things – your business processes – are what stop your clients from running off to the competition.
At Workmaster, we’ve spent ages figuring out how to turn that hard-to-explain knowledge into practical business processes and workflows. The trick is to keep your processes flexible and use past results to tweak things as you go – nothing lasts forever. Now, we’re building AI agents that can handle business processes from the get-go. They can chat to clients, understand what they want and kick off the right workflow. These agents can read data, scan documents, look at images – just like a human – and use all that info to guide their actions, all within the standard business processes that you, as the boss, control.
But doesn’t that mean you need loads of technical know-how to get your AI-powered business going? Isn’t it expensive, with IT companies building everything for you?
We know most small businesses aren’t in a position – or just don’t fancy – doing all that. The good news is AI can help solve this problem, too.
Our builder bot isn’t just an AI coder – it’s a business enablement specialist. It’ll have a conversation with you, find out what your business does, and turn that into a working system. Like how you use an LLM to whip up PowerPoint presentations, you can use a similar approach to draft and refine the business processes that make your business tick. You don’t have to do it all in one go – just start with something simple, maybe a customer engagement process, and add more as you get used to it.
You don’t need a complicated IT setup, because Workmaster’s builder AI knows how to build workflows and the AI that runs them. It does all the little jobs you’d normally rely on an IT department for – writing code, hosting it for testing and production, even debugging and testing.
As you use the system, all the information you feed in – your manuals, user docs (kept safe with tight access controls) – and the AI running your business just get more powerful.
And that’s how you survive and thrive in a world where thinking and intelligence are now driven by machines.