Small businesses using AI say it’s having a positive impact — not because it’s replacing workers
There is no shortage of economic uncertainty for the country’s small businesses, but many are very surprised by the year ahead. The source of that idea: artificial intelligence.
That’s what Goldman Sachs (GS) is available to 1,400 small business owners – and shared exclusively with Yahoo! Finance’s close to 10,000 small business owners in Washington, DC, this week.
Results: Very few business owners (78%) say they are very optimistic in the next year despite there being no shortage of concerns (economic costs, access to expensive capital), and almost all of them say they are using a positive impact on their business.
“It saves hours a day,” Khari Parker, a small business owner and founder of the Baltimore Read chain Confein Chicken and Waffles, told Yahoo Finance.
Parker said that among the three restaurants at his restaurant in Baltimore, AI tools such as OpenAi’s (Opai.pvt) Chat-GPT and Anthropic’s (ANTH.pvt) Claude are used to design menus and flyers to create materials and trainers.
The models even play a major role in forecasting supply orders and act as a “tiebreaker” when Parker and his business partner disagree.
“I definitely don’t see replacing team members, in any way,” Parker added. Across industries, major companies from tech and finance to retail have said AI will reshape their work. But it remains a heated debate even as AI has already disrupted this year’s job market.
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Unemployment among Wishe college graduates is rising this year as hiring in some white-collar jobs has been cut. Some of the biggest companies in the country, including Amazon (AMZN), Walmart (WMT), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), and Meta (Meta), have recently signed on and expect to increase revenue without adding more employees, and in some cases even cutting headcount.
Goldman Sachs economists have warned that AI could bring “transformational tension” to the job market of the future.
Meanwhile, the bank’s top executives sent a memo to employees, as seen by Yahoo Finance earlier this month, announcing year-end growth “in excess” of the expected reductions in the firm’s cutbacks. “
The firm still expects to finish the year with a full workforce increase, a Goldman spokeswoman said.
“Although we can’t always measure it accurately, there are definitely products being produced from Ayi,” jpmorgan cfo Jeremy Barnum told analysts earlier this month. The bank is targeting ‘headcount growth,’ Barnum said.
