How small businesses can leverage AI

This article is from Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across industries. To receive it in your inbox,sign up here. From accounting to design to market research and product development, there’s a staggering breadth of skills needed to run a business. A large company can hire experts to handle these tasks, but small businesses don’t always have this luxury. That’s where AI comes in. Today’s AI models do a decent job at these tasks. The trick for small businesses is to understand where AI is good enough and where it’s not. One place where a “good enough” AI can already be quite valuable to small business owners is in providing secretarial skills and handling basic administrative matters. Let’s take a look at how one private tutor is using it to improve his recordkeeping and free up his time. Case study Sam Finnegan-Dehn works in fundraising for a charity, but he moonlights as a math and philosophy tutor for university students from his home in London. Through this part-time business, he can leverage his degrees in philosophy and share his love of the subject with clients. But meeting with students is only a fraction of the work it takes to be a good tutor. He also plans lessons and finds fresh reading materials, creates assignments, sends invoices, and keeps up with new research—all on top of his regular job. Given these demands, Finnegan-Dehn doesn’t have as much time as he’d like to grow his tutoring roster. So he’s turned to AI for some help in managing the day-to-day aspects of his business. He says AI has taken on a secretarial role across all of his digital notebooks, where he jots down reminders about his clients’ progress and new readings to keep himself up-to-date. He describes using AI as kind of like having a second memory that helps him connect ideas he’s written down in various places. While he has experimented with different tools like Claude and ChatGPT, he’s now landed on Notion AI because it int