I spent a morning a couple months ago in a masterclass on AI for executives, run by Dr. Cindy Gordon. It was sharp and well made and I love what Cindy is doing. It also taught me a lesson every SMB leader needs to hear.
Most of the examples Cindy covered focused on banks, where the infrastructure included things like cloud architecture and machine learning operations.
We looked at a readiness audit with more than 300 questions in it. At one point, we were looking at an operating model with a governance office, an AI hub and something called AI spokes reporting into it.
And that’s when something clicked for me. If you run a 30-person company, or even a 150-person company, you probably don’t have an AI hub. And if you were sitting in that room, you might have left feeling further behind than when you walked in.
But early in the presentation, Cindy shared some numbers that should be reassuring to SMB leaders.
When people study why AI projects fail, the split comes out roughly like this:
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- 10% of the difficulty is the algorithms
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- 20% is the technology around them
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- and 70% is people, process and the way the organization actually works
That means the technology side is actually the small part. The big part (the part that decides whether any of this actually works) is the part you may have an advantage in.
Which means you may actually be in a better position than a bank or other large company to adopt AI successfully.
A large organization trying to shift how its people work needs a change program, a steering committee and maybe three years to actually make it happen. But you could change how your people work by the end of the month. You know all their names. You know which of them is scared of AI and which one is already three tools deep without telling you.
And if you don’t know, you can simply walk over and ask.
That nimbleness isn’t a consolation prize for being smaller. It’s an actual advantage that makes the hardest part of AI adoption easier.
Being small gives you an advantage. It doesn’t make AI adoption effortless. You still have to do the hard work of figuring out how people should use it and how work needs to change. But unlike a bank, you can make those changes much faster and more directly.
That doesn’t mean AI adoption is easy for SMBs. You still have to do the work of figuring out where AI fits, getting your people on board and changing how work gets done. No platform can do that work for you. But with a smaller team, you can do it much faster.
Here are two questions I think you should ask in your next team meeting:
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- Who here is already using AI, and for what? (Ask this in a way that makes the honest answer safe.)
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- What is one piece of work we do badly or slowly that we’d want to fix even if AI didn’t exist?
Start there instead of jumping to the tool.
Moral of the story: You’re not behind the big players. You’re actually closer to the part that matters.
