AI for SMBs

I would like to think by now, most big (e.g. Fortune 500) companies have adopted/implemented AI by now. That led me to wonder: how about SMBs?

SMB can range from local mom and pop shops, froyo chains, companies in totally random industries. Silent millionaires like the people you see riding business class on domestic flights.
And while small, collectively there are 36 MM businesses that make up 43.5% of US GDP, or $12 Trillion of economic output.

Then, I saw Anthropic trying to go after this market as well.

Anthropic: Download Claude Cowork, integrate connectors (e.g Salesforce, Hubspot), and ask away on the chat app. (Browser automation is too slow and flaky)

I think onboarding is difficult here (imagine teaching boomers AI lingo like Skills, MCPs, etc.) and most importantly, they don’t use these connectors. Some processes are very manual (i.e. pen and paper), and some use archaic, bespoke software (if it ain’t broke, why fix?) It’s difficult to see how many will become power-users.

Big companies are not immune to this, but due to their budget, Forward Deployed Engineers (/Engineering) (FDE) made sense. Where Anthropic would send dedicated individuals and embed them into their company, learning the pain points and help integration hand by hand.

SMBs don’t have this type of budget. FDE is really tedious (which could be a startup moat) so AI labs may not send FDEs there.

So from overly simplistic view, I have some thoughts:

SMBs that take the initiative on their part to fully integrate with AI will see immense success. But that’s if AI can really solve their pain points. If AI is not super needed and it's nice to have, I think this can become a vanity project.
I think for SMB, it doesn’t make financial sense to use enterprise-pricing or based on API usage. They should use fixed fee plans (e.g. Claude Max, ChatGPT Pro) because accidental over usage of AI (e.g. Uber spending all their annual AI budget in 4 months) may actually kill their businesses.
Then I think this spurs on the competitive landscape for SMBs where SMBs can gain edge by utilizing AI more. Some SMBs may become obsolete by these competitors. Some SMBs actually may be shielded entirely from the AI boom if AI doesn’t really give anyone here an edge. (creative person may find a creative way here to disrupt; who knows)

But I feel like this is the lowest hanging fruit. Most of them don’t need the fancy latest AI stuff. After talking to a few, I observed their pain points could be solved by the simplest AI solution. Yes, I’ve seen so many AI/ChatGPT/Agent/Cursor for X. But a lot of it I feel like comes down to how deep do you wanna go in FDE.

But when it came to pricing, a lot of them didn’t expect AI solutions to cost that much.

Also, a lot of the sentiment was like: it’d be cool to have AI in my business, but often they don’t know what they want. I think this is due to them not realizing what’s possible with AI so their vision is limited. You have to prescribe how AI can help their businesses. Simple stuff like summarizing my emails or preparing me for my next meeting is not super necessary.

It really comes down to learning about their businesses and figuring out the solutions together. No, I don’t think you can substitute this with an AI chatbot to extract what they want. That sounds super impersonal.