Artificial Intelligence is changing one of the most consequential decisions a small business owner makes: when to pay another person for help.
According to new research from FreshBooks, 86% of solopreneurs and microbusiness owners say that when they encounter a business task they cannot complete entirely on their own, they try using AI before hiring someone to do it.
The finding suggests that for America’s smallest businesses, AI is evolving beyond a productivity tool into a new source of business capacity, allowing one person or a very small team to take on work, solve problems and serve clients in ways that once may have required additional headcount or outside help.
That shift is a central finding of FreshBooks’ new report, The Era of the Solopreneur, based on a Wakefield Research survey of 500 solopreneurs and microbusiness owners.
Asked to choose which capability would matter more to their future business success, 64% selected the ability to appear bigger or more capable than their actual size, compared with 36% who chose getting more done without adding time, employees or costs.
“AI is starting to change the math of running a very small business,” said Shaheen Javadizadeh, CEO at FreshBooks. “For a solopreneur, the question isn’t only, ‘Can this tool save me an hour?’ Increasingly, it’s, ‘Can this help me take on a client, solve a problem or deliver a level of service that previously would have required another person?’ That’s a fundamentally different kind of leverage.”
