Forbes recently published a piece illuminating the often-overlooked scale of small businesses in the American economy - they account for 99.9% of U.S. businesses, employ nearly 46% of the private-sector workforce, and generate roughly 44% of U.S. economic activity. Yet many of the technologies transforming larger enterprises remain out of reach for smaller businesses: software sold through pricey enterprise seats, cybersecurity platforms built for dedicated IT teams, data infrastructure requiring specialized operators, and increasingly, AI products whose value depends on access to costly compute and tokens.
For decades, this lack of scale has dictated what technology and expertise a small business could afford. A Fortune 500 company can maintain dedicated teams across cybersecurity, accounting, legal, analytics, and corporate finance; the owner of a ten-person business cannot.
Traditional enterprise software made specialists more productive, but still required a specialist to run it. Bloomberg, for instance, gives financial professionals extraordinary access to data and tools, but still requires an analyst to turn that access into an answer. AI is increasingly absorbing more of that middle layer, turning raw information into finished analysis. Bloomberg remains enormously valuable, but the trajectory is clear: expertise that once lived in the analyst is increasingly being built into the technology itself.
Small businesses represent a distinctly personal form of commerce: businesses built over generations, products shaped by local tastes, loyal customers who return month after month, and owners whose understanding of their communities is difficult for larger institutions to replicate.
Now, with the emergence of artificial intelligence, there’s an opportunity to give these businesses the best of both worlds: access to sophisticated technology and expertise at a price they can afford, without sacrificing what makes each business unique. We see an early example of this shift in our partnership with SMB.co, an AI-native platform helping small business owners navigate the sale of companies they may have spent decades building.
More than 80% of owners lack a credible valuation or a formal exit plan, while the traditional broker model remains too expensive and labor-intensive to serve much of the market. SMB.co analyzes data across more than 19 million businesses to provide owners with market-backed valuations, identify prospective buyers, generate transaction materials, and streamline the process from initial interest through diligence and closing. In effect, the platform is bringing sophisticated M&A infrastructure to a long tail of businesses that historically could not justify the cost of traditional advisory services.
Indiana offers an early glimpse of what this can look like at scale. Through Indiana’s Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation, SMB.co equipped tens of thousands of business owners with free access to instant valuations, transition-readiness assessments, and exit-planning tools, while local economic development organizations received live dashboards identifying succession risk and buyer readiness. The result is a different model for economic development: rather than waiting for an aging owner to close a business, communities can proactively identify companies at risk of succession failure and connect them with potential buyers before that economic activity disappears from the community.
What makes this model particularly powerful is its ability to deliver “mass personalization”. A rural manufacturer and a multi-location dental practice are both “small businesses,” yet their financial profiles, risk factors, and succession paths are entirely distinct. Historically, tailoring an exit strategy required an advisor to spend dozens of billable hours learning the business; AI enables automated systems to synthesize vast datasets, benchmark a company against millions of peers, and continuously incorporate company-specific financials and operating history - delivering high-touch advisory capabilities without a proportional increase in human labor.
It’s exciting to see this thesis emerging across a broader landscape. Basis is using AI agents to bring sophisticated accounting workflows to smaller firms without equivalent increases in headcount. Inforcer approaches the same problem from a different angle, equipping MSPs with the infrastructure to deliver enterprise-grade cybersecurity across thousands of SMB customers.
AI is lowering the minimum efficient scale at which sophisticated expertise can be deployed. A ten-person business can increasingly access financial analysis, cybersecurity, and operational capabilities that once required the resources of a much larger organization. This has the potential to change what it means to be a small business: companies can remain small, local, and deeply personal while operating with a level of sophistication historically reserved for enterprises many times their size.