forbes
Alison Salisbury
Small businesses employ nearly half of all Americans working in the private sector, and they have created a large share of new jobs over the past decade. These are local restaurants, dog nurseries, flower shops, salons, and construction companies that create good jobs and are the foundation of our daily lives.
They are the backbone of communities everywhere, but they are particularly important employers in historically disadvantaged areas of our cities and small towns across this country.
However, despite their economic and social importance, these 33 million small and medium-sized businesses have not benefited fully from the HR technologies that support larger companies. That’s because, historically, small business owners have assumed that talent management and learning solutions don’t help them do what they care about most: surviving and growing their businesses.
Take the dog’s owner to daycare. They’re not going to buy a general business with a box course if what they need to learn is specific to operating a facility that handles live animals. And you’re not going to ask your extremely busy hourly employees to take a general business course when you really need to teach them how to handle dogs safely.
But with Generative AI’s human-like reasoning, conversational interfaces, and creativity, we can now design hyper-personalized solutions at scale. For example, you can build learning experiences that focus on the fundamentals of running a particular business, which moves these solutions from nice-to-haves to must-haves for small businesses. I will.
Until now, small and medium-sized businesses have been unable to fully benefit from the technology that helps larger companies grow, develop their workforce, and operate more efficiently because they lack the scale needed to make enterprise solutions work. . Available talent management solutions were prohibitively expensive due to high customization costs. While large companies can afford to implement customized HR systems and talent management programs, smaller companies are left with a one-size-fits-all approach that often falls short. .
But AI changes that.
The main reason for this is the shift to a service-as-software model, where technology can partially or completely replace services that could previously only be performed by humans, allowing service companies to outgrow the profits and scale of technology companies. This means that it can now be operated by And the difference between the two is significant: technology sector’s profit margins are around 75% or more, while services sector’s profit margins are 30%. This suddenly makes it much cheaper to create and deliver HR and learning solutions that require significant personalization for businesses and employees.
Here are just some of the things we can do right now.
We provide personalized business coaching to owners starting and growing their businesses. Most SMB owners are passionate about what they do, but lack experience in the ins and outs of starting and running a business. An AI companion is one that has dozens of experienced experts at your fingertips at any time. Implement personalized learning and development. AI creates custom onboarding and learning paths for each employee, ensuring more effective skill development and career progression. Large companies have been offering high-quality solutions for years, but now small businesses can take advantage of them too. Strengthen recruitment and recruitment. AI-powered tools can create job descriptions, vet resumes, perform initial screening, and even predict candidate success, dramatically increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of the hiring process. . Improves performance and retention. AI-powered continuous feedback systems provide real-time insights into employee performance and sentiment, enabling timely interventions and support. Employ guided agents that can run complete workflows. AI agents can perform complete workflows such as performing HR tasks, creating marketing campaigns, and promoting sales at low cost. These can and will be replaced by people, but they will also shift many people’s roles to more creative and strategic work to grow the business.
There are huge opportunities here for both market growth and social good. Start building for 50 percent of your small business workforce.
