Big Tech’s AI race will save small business owners time. It won’t find them customers

Detailed summary

The next customer is one introduction away.

Meta, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to become the small business owner’s AI assistant. Meta brought its Muse agent to small businesses in September. Anthropic and OpenAI now package tools aimed squarely at owners, and Google is building the same features into tools millions of them already use.

That competition is good for Main Street. But it’s a race to save owners time, and time isn’t what keeps them up at night. What keeps them up is where the next customer will come from.

A word on where I sit. I run Alignable, a network of 10 million small business owners, so I have a stake in this argument. Alignable also co-hosts small business AI training with Anthropic, one of the companies named here. Read what follows with that in mind. But I also have something the assistants don’t: 13 years of data on how small businesses actually find work.

Start with where customers come from.

Opening of the article, excerpted from Fortune. To read the rest, open the article on the publisher's site.