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Business leaders across industries reveal how artificial intelligence is helping small and midsize companies scale faster, make better decisions, and unlock opportunities once reserved for large organizations.
Small and midsize businesses have traditionally faced significant disadvantages relative to enterprise competitors. Limited budgets, lean teams, and constrained resources have often forced SMBs to do more with less. Today, artificial intelligence has transformed that reality. Across industries, founders and CEOs are discovering that AI is far more than a cost-cutting tool. Instead, it is becoming a capability multiplier, enabling once-unimaginable outcomes.
From customer support and business intelligence to healthcare research, virtual staging, and back-office operations, AI is helping SMBs scale smarter, move faster, and compete harder.
Solving Workflow Challenges Instead of Replacing Employees
For Nahid Abyari, Founder of AI Profit Lab, the biggest misconception about AI is that it exists to replace workers. In practice, he sees it as a solution for workflow bottlenecks that often slow growth.
“There are so many repetitive tasks done daily by employees. Lots of them really don’t need new decisions, just repetitive. I did an AI receptionist for them—a WhatsApp receptionist. The AI knows the values, knows how to get the exchange rate, and how to answer. So they don’t need to hire more people to scale their business.”
By automating repetitive customer interactions, businesses can absorb growth without expanding payroll. Yet Abyari remains cautious about handing critical decisions to machines.
“I do not trust AI to decide for lots of things. Even when I do an AI WhatsApp receptionist for clients, I recommend to say in the first sentence: this is AI chatting with you. If it comes to a decision, hand over the conversation to human beings. I think AI is still not so mature to make decisions for businesses.”
This balance between automation and oversight also informs the company’s Live CEO Dashboard, which provides real-time operational visibility.
“I am doing a Live CEO Dashboard, and it is visualizing everything going on inside the business—as charts, as tables, and with AI notes on what you should do and what you should not do. Every time I was waiting for my accountant to give me a monthly report, by the time it came to you, something was already finished. This solves that.”
Better Decisions, Not Just Faster Work
At eCommerce Today, Founder and CEO Stefan Chiriacescu has found that AI’s greatest value lies in improving outcomes rather than accelerating processes.
“We shouldn’t use AI to be faster. We should use AI to be better, to deliver more to our clients. In some cases, we end up spending more time getting the same result as last year, but the result is net superior.”
The company has also leveraged AI to develop internal systems that would have otherwise required significant investment.
“We were able to build our own operating system that has human resource management, business intelligence, project management, CRM, culture and people and gamification, knowledge base, and academy. We built all of this in under half a year, and we were saving like $30,000 to $32,000 a year.”
However, Chiriacescu emphasizes that successful AI deployment requires ongoing management.
“When you deploy an agent in your organization, it’s not deploy and forget. You have to do monthly one-on-ones. You have to analyze the work. You have to react to mistakes and adjust the behavior. It’s not set and forget. It’s set and manage.”
Bringing Advanced Research Within Reach
The healthcare sector presents unique challenges for AI, particularly when accuracy is critical. Bruno Sarfati, CEO of Tekkare, believes AI has dramatically expanded what smaller organizations can accomplish.
“In the past, when you had big pharma, they had an entire department to analyze all this data, treat it, summarize it, detect the right evidence, make the right decision. Nowadays, that’s no longer the case. If you have the right data and the right tool—AI—it’s no longer a question of having a team or having the right experts. Everything changed.”
Still, Sarfati argues that human judgment remains the most important component.
“The key is not AI—the key is human. The problem is no longer to have the AI model; everyone has one. What is now important is who is using it. You don’t need to be a big expert. You need to have a mindset of criticism and challenging the AI. That’s the key component.”
To ensure reliability, Tekkare deliberately relies on verified data sources.
“One of the big principles: if you want to reduce hallucinations and be sure you’re making decisions on the right data, you have to reduce web search. The more you use AI for web search, the more you risk hallucination. We took the hard decision to collect only verified, official, and traceable data. The result is that there is no web search, and you are sure the AI is only using verified data.”
Making Enterprise Tools Accessible
Meanwhile, Harrison Kaye, CEO and Founder of Reel Estate, is using AI to dramatically reduce the costs of real estate marketing.
“At regular market rates, it’s about $40 a photo for virtual staging right now. On our platform, it comes out to about $0.30. The delta is just massive. Everyone has known for 15 or 20 years that video sells things better than photos. The reason it never caught on is it was really expensive to do. Now you can spend 10 to 15 bucks and have that turnaround be instant.”
AI has also streamlined routine content creation tasks.
“All day is generating documents, pitches, talking to people. I throw Gemini on record mode, record a bunch of text, drop it in, and I get a nice beginning place to then go edit and craft what I need. You’d sit down for an hour to write something, and instead, you can do it while you’re in the car.”
For Kaye, adaptability will determine success in the AI era.
“You’re not going to lose your job to AI. You’re going to lose your job to a guy using AI. The people who are trained to use these tools, who are open to the idea of trying new things—within two weeks, there’s almost nothing you can’t get some sort of functional grasp on. And it’s just nuts.”
Returning Time to Business Owners
For Rob Bowers, Founder of Lawnager, AI’s impact is measured in time recovered from administrative work.
“Operators are spending about 20 to 25% of their time on back-office functions—whether that’s quoting, tracking down payments, managing their books. Our AI solution is helping automate at least 99% of it. There’s still a component they need to review and make sure everything buttons up, but for the most part, it’s a lot of back-office automation to recover that time.”
The platform is also helping operators improve cash flow.
“A lot of what I saw was receivables taking more than 60 days to collect, and sometimes they just got lost in the shuffle because they wrote it down, or they forgot, or it rained. Now we’re able to surface the receivables much faster. We’re able to enable auto-pay, and they’re able to cash flow—especially with fuel prices the way they are.”
Just as importantly, the technology remains accessible to non-technical users.
“The number one thing we do in all the technology that we build is: if you need to read a manual, we did something wrong. We need to make it as easy as possible. We need to make the choices basically yes or no. You don’t need to have a master’s degree to use the app.”
A New Competitive Reality
The common thread connecting all five companies is that AI is not replacing what SMBs do. Instead, it is expanding what they can do. Whether through real-time executive intelligence, deeper data analysis, enterprise-grade healthcare research, low-cost virtual staging, or automated back-office operations, AI is placing powerful capabilities within reach of businesses that previously lacked the resources to access them.
At the same time, AI is not a magic solution. Businesses seeing the strongest results treat it as a tool that requires human judgment, oversight, and continuous management.
