{"id":125210,"date":"2026-07-31T02:55:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T02:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/125210\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T02:55:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T02:55:10","slug":"small-business-owners-ays-ai-helps-not-hurts-them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/125210\/","title":{"rendered":"Small business owners ays AI helps, not hurts them"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you listen to the loudest voices in the artificial intelligence debate, you would think America is on the brink of an apocalypse and that \u201cTerminator\u201d-style robots are hunting humans, rogue computers are turning on their creators like Hal in \u201c2001: A Space Odyssey,\u201d mass layoffs<\/a> are rampant and data centers are destroying all of our small towns.<\/p>\n

But three years after ChatGPT was first introduced, the new normal of life with AI so far is a lot less dire and a lot more convenient.<\/p>\n

Ita Reyes, who runs Ita Yoga Studio in Ann Arbor, Mich., said AI is \u201csuch a simple, simple tool that can do so much. Why would you not give that to yourself and to your business?\u201d Courtesy of Ita Reyes<\/p>\n

The technology has enabled medical professionals to spend more time with their patients, allowed small business owners to expand more quickly and hire more employees and helped entrepreneurs promote their endeavors.<\/p>\n

That is the emerging picture from people I spoke with across the country, and it\u2019s also reflected in the data. Google\u2019s recent ATLAS study<\/a> of 15 million Gemini users found AI is primarily used as a complement to work and doesn\u2019t replace human work.<\/p>\n

There are, of course, legitimate concerns about privacy, misinformation and whether AI might be fueling some people\u2019s delusions<\/a> \u2014 but there is also a great danger in refusing to adopt the most important technology of the modern age.<\/p>\n

Many tech executives I spoke with suggested the real fear is not getting replaced by AI but rather getting replaced by someone who knows how to use AI.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s also how Ita Reyes, who runs Ita Yoga Studio in Ann Arbor, Mich., sees it.<\/p>\n

TJ and Kayce Weed praised Meta\u2019s AI for helping them to easily amp up their marketing and social media for their coffeeshops in northeastern Louisiana. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen the internet showed up \u2026 if you didn\u2019t jump on it you were left out,\u201d Reyes, who also manages a hardware store with her husband, told me. \u201cThis is the same exact turning-point moment \u2026 If you don\u2019t jump into this wagon, you\u2019re going to be left behind \u2026 It is such a simple, simple tool that can do so much. Why would you not give that to yourself and to your business?\u201d<\/p>\n

Reyes credits her Meta glasses, which can record footage and upload her photos, with making it easier to promote her studio.<\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as those came out, I started taking content with them \u2026 for my social media.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another husband-and-wife team, TJ and Kayce Weed, praised Meta\u2019s AI for helping them to easily amp up their marketing and social media for their coffeeshops in northeastern Louisiana. Using the high-tech tools, they\u2019ve been able to bring in more revenue and focus on expansion. No one has lost their job \u2014 quite the opposite in fact.<\/p>\n

Charlotte Coates, a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner based in Dallas, told The Post \u201cUsing AI in the last two years has significantly reduced administrative overhead.\u201d Courtesy of Charlotte Coates<\/p>\n

\u201cWe have actually hired more people because we have gotten busier. So I\u2019m able to be in the background more and handle more business aspects and actually be a business owner,\u201d said Kayce, who has used AI to optimize and proofread social media posts.<\/p>\n

TJ has used the tech to run the numbers on the backend. \u201c[I\u2019m] looking at our profit margins, and do we need to adjust pricing, and letting AI kind of like loop through it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Charlotte Coates, a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner based in Dallas, is already seeing AI reshape the medical landscape in a way that gives clinicians more time to focus on patients.<\/p>\n

\u201cUsing AI in the last two years has significantly reduced administrative overhead,\u201d said Coates, the Founding Clinical Lead at Legion Health, a virtual health clinic<\/a>. \u201cIt lets me refocus on what I think is core to the role \u2014 developing a treatment plan, focusing on patients.\u201d<\/p>\n

For new patients, especially those arriving with multiple records, AI helps her quickly figure out what is going on. \u201cA LLM reads through documentation and forms and questions and gives a summary,\u201d she explained.<\/p>\n

In Louisiana\u2019s rural Richland Parish, teachers are receiving bonuses of more than $50,000 this year after local sales-tax revenue more than doubled thanks to construction of Meta\u2019s massive Hyperion data center.<\/p>\n

Besides providing benefits to small businesses and those that work for them, AI is also creating thousands of new jobs to build its physical infrastructure. Electricians, welders, construction workers, and technicians are all in demand to build the data centers and their power systems and cooling networks.<\/p>\n

Companies like Meta and Google are now spending tens of millions<\/a> \u2014 $115 million and $50 million, respectively, this year alone \u2014 to train electricians, welders, and other skilled trades workers. The AI boom depends on physical infrastructure that only these workers can build.<\/p>\n

Residents in towns willing to host that infrastructure are also seeing the upside.<\/p>\n

In Louisiana\u2019s rural Richland Parish, teachers are receiving bonuses of more than $50,000 this year after local sales-tax revenue more than doubled thanks to construction of Meta\u2019s massive Hyperion data center. A town with just 20,000 people has already collected more than $40M in sales and use taxes in the first nine months of the fiscal year thanks to embracing data centers.<\/p>\n

That is the story Meta is telling. Last week the company launched its \u201cThe Future is for Everyone\u201d campaign, which highlights stories like those of Reyes and the Weeds \u2014 ordinary people using AI to build their businesses and share in the benefits of the new technology.<\/p>\n

Dina Powell McCormick, Meta\u2019s president and vice chairman, has been one of the most visible AI optimists. \u201cBy working together, we can make this moment transformational for humanity. The future can be for everyone.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dina Powell McCormick, Meta\u2019s president and vice chairman, has been one of the most visible champions of AI. Getty Images<\/p>\n

Still, some of the masterminds behind the tech are stuck in a doom-and-gloom mindset.<\/p>\n

Open AI\u2019s Sam Altman and Anthropic\u2019s Dario Amodei both signed a 2023 statement declaring that \u201cmitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.\u201d Elon Musk has called Artificial General Intelligence a \u201csignificantly higher risk than nuclear weapons.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, these titans have done so while spending billion to develop the systems faster, raising questions about why they\u2019re simultaneously trying to terrify people while still moving forward with the technology.<\/p>\n

To be sure, some disruption is inevitable. Young workers may face new barriers in certain entry-level roles and of course no one knows how the technology may evolve. Meta has indeed had widely publicized layoffs, where 8,000 employees (roughly 10% of its workforce) got pink slips. But reports suggested some of that was to remove jobs that were redundant, with or without AI. <\/p>\n

But so far, mass displacement simply is not happening.<\/p>\n

AI is both skill-biased and labor-augmenting. It \u201crelies on humans in the loop to direct and evaluate the most complex work\u201d and \u201cbroadens the scope of what people can accomplish,\u201d Anthropic\u2019s head of economics, Peter McCrory, wrote in a recent analysis.<\/p>\n

That view is echoed in broader surveys. The World Economic Forum\u2019s Future of Jobs Report projects 170 million new roles created versus 92 million displaced by 2030 \u2014 a net gain of roughly 78 million jobs.<\/p>\n

And we have seen this movie before.<\/p>\n

When electricity first arrived, critics feared electrocution, fires, job losses and social disruption. Instead, it transformed homes, cities, medicine and industry \u2014 creating huge productivity gains and entirely new forms of work and leisure.<\/p>\n

It is legitimate to ask hard questions about AI. It is even legitimate to fear the unknown. But it\u2019s also legitimate to fear what happens when people won\u2019t adopt it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"If you listen to the loudest voices in the artificial intelligence debate, you would think America is on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":125211,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[6744,53,3013,25,309,3261,39,1148,1122,157,370,3178],"class_list":["post-125210","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-agi","tag-agi","tag-anthropic","tag-artificial-general-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-business","tag-dario-amodei","tag-data-centers","tag-facebook","tag-meta","tag-openai","tag-sam-altman","tag-small-business"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125210","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125210"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125210\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/125211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125210"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125210"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125210"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}