The Impact of AI on Small Businesses

I have done a lot of research about AI and tried to figure out how to use the models and how to get something out of it. The longer I deal with Ai, the more I see also the negative aspects that a lot of people are not talking about.

How AI changes businesses

If you run a small business, if you want it or not, AI will change how things work and it starts with your website and your social media profiles. Open AI, Claude and Google are fighting around a market that so far was Google's domain: search. Whenever people were looking up something on the internet, they 'googled' it to get the best links. He would get a list of results that were answering his quest. This is however, changing a lot. Since chatgpt, copilot, perplexity and all the others are giving answers in a similar fashion now, google has to adapt their game and they introduce more or less aggressively AI search results. So when you enter a question, you also get an AI summary of your answer and it seems that this will become the norm and we will get less and less lists of links.

This will have a major repercussion on small business throughout the world. Why ? Because now instead of getting 10 pages of results for a search, AI will curate maybe a handful and often will not even provide the link to the website. This means that the results of pages 2 to 10 will not be visible anymore. What will be visible will be the companies that have a lot of social proof, meaning the big companies and small companies will struggle to get visibility.

Chatgpt and co, want to fight for this market because it might be a solution to generate income if they can take market parts away from google. It's probably only a matter of time until businesses need to pay to be visible on AI searches...

Same story for social media

If you have a business and you run social media posts, you probably realized that the organic reach of these posts have been decreasing constantly over the years. If you have 10'000 followers, in the past about 20 to 40% of them saw your posts. According to the platform, this has decreased to 2 to 10%. So what needs to be done? You need to pay. Again it's the companies with the big budgets that can play this game.

Also, if you have tried to run social media campaigns for your business, you will quickly realize that paying is not enough to actually get views and leads. You almost need a phd to understand all the details to run a campaign successfully.

Social medias are run by algorithms that are actually nothing else than AI's with other names...

The challenge for small businesses – how to remain visible

The main factor of visibility online for a business so far was social media and the own website but the game is changing and they can have the best website and great social media content and still not get any visibility. With less organic visibility, cost of customer acquisition goes up, costs for businesses go up and income goes down.

The snowball effect

Now talk with several business owners and they all tell you the same story. Less income, less leads, less customers, ai implementations, costs of ai, fear of diminishing businesses. This directly translates into employees being scared for their jobs and reducing spending. The negative spiral starts and it's difficult to evaluate how fast it acts.

I don't see much in the media about that topic but it's definitely here and it touches small businesses that are the backbone of our society quite strongly. What will be the long term effects of that ?

How is it in your country ? Do you feel this ?

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With @ph1102, I'm running the @liotes project.

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