Why Small Businesses Can't Afford to Wait on AI

When I talk to other business owners about AI, I hear the same things:

"I don't have time to learn AI."

"I'll wait until it's easier."

"That stuff is for tech companies."

I get it. You're running jobs, making payroll, putting out fires. You don't have margin for experiments. You can't afford to bet on hype.

But that's exactly why this matters.

You're not the ones who can afford to wait. You're the ones who can least afford to miss this.

The Big Company Advantage

Big companies will adopt AI eventually. They'll do it slowly, expensively, and bureaucratically. They'll form committees. They'll hire consultants. They'll run pilots that take 18 months to produce a PowerPoint deck.

And they'll be fine.

They have the capital to survive their own inefficiency. They can afford to be late. They can afford to overpay when they finally do adopt. The margin of error for a Fortune 500 company is enormous.

Small businesses don't have that luxury.

When a big company wastes a year debating AI strategy, it's a rounding error on their quarterly report. When you waste a year, it might be the difference between growing and going under.

The Gap That's Coming

Right now, AI capabilities are being subsidized. The tech giants are bleeding money to win market share. That means the same tools available to enterprise customers are available to you—at prices that have nothing to do with actual value.

This won't last.

When the subsidies end and building gets expensive again, when the giants have AI woven into everything they do, the gap between big and small won't just return to normal.

It will be wider than it's ever been.

Think about what AI does for a large company: it makes their existing advantages more powerful. More data to train on. More processes to automate. More capital to invest in custom solutions.

Now think about what AI does for a small company—if you use it: it lets you compete on capabilities that used to require massive resources. Custom software. Sophisticated analysis. Automated workflows. Things that were reserved for companies with IT departments and six-figure software budgets.

The question is whether you'll use it while it's accessible. Or whether you'll wait until the big companies have a head start you can't close.

The Waiting Trap

"I'll wait until it's more mature."

This is the most dangerous sentence in business right now.

AI is mature enough. It's not perfect—nothing is—but it's capable of doing real work that creates real value. The companies that are waiting for "more mature" are really waiting for "less risky." And there's no such thing as risk-free.

Here's what waiting actually means: you're betting that the technology will get better faster than your competitors will learn to use it. You're betting that you can catch up later without paying a penalty for being late.

That bet usually loses.

The companies that figured out e-commerce early didn't wait for it to be "proven." The companies that adopted cloud computing didn't wait until everyone else had done it first. First movers take risks, and they also take rewards.

Right now, the risk of acting is much lower than people think. The tools are accessible. The cost is subsidized. The learning curve is manageable.

The risk of waiting? You fall behind competitors who moved earlier. You pay higher prices when you finally adopt. You try to catch up to people who have years of experience you don't have.

What "Using AI" Actually Means

I'm not talking about using ChatGPT to write emails. That's fine, but it's not what matters.

What matters is building. Creating solutions that didn't exist before. Automating processes that used to require manual work. Developing capabilities that let you serve customers better.

The small business that uses AI to build a custom workflow for their specific problem has an advantage that no off-the-shelf software can match. The contractor who uses AI to analyze their financial data in real-time sees problems weeks before the contractor who's checking spreadsheets monthly.

These aren't theoretical advantages. They're operational advantages that compound over time.

Every month you don't have them, your competitor who does is pulling ahead.

The Time Argument

"I don't have time to learn AI."

You don't have time not to.

Every hour you spend on tasks that AI could do is an hour you're not spending on things only you can do. Every workflow you run manually that could be automated is friction that slows you down.

Time isn't static. It's a resource, and how you invest it determines what you can achieve. If you invest time now learning to use these tools, you get returns in productivity for years. If you don't invest that time, you pay the tax of manual work forever.

I run multiple businesses. I host a podcast. I have a family. I'm not sitting around with unlimited time to experiment.

But I made time to learn this because the alternative—watching the opportunity pass while I was "too busy"—was worse.

The Real Risk

The risk isn't that AI doesn't work. It does.

The risk isn't that you'll waste time learning something useless. You won't.

The real risk is that you'll watch this wave pass from the shore because you were too busy to paddle out.

Big companies will be fine. They have the resources to catch up later.

You don't.

The wave is lifting everyone right now. Small and big, same water level. But the wave is temporary. When it recedes, whoever built something keeps what they built.