AI for small businesses: When to make the leap?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the new “IT” phrase grabbing all the attention, but views on the tech can be polarizing. While proponents believe AI is a digital godsend businesses can’t live without, detractors say AI is not ready for prime time or worse, that it will lead us to doomsday.
Amid conflicting messages, many leaders and IT professionals are on the fence about whether to use AI for small businesses (SMBs). We’re here to bring clarity to the debate around the value of AI in SMBs by highlighting research insights, expert opinions, and real-world use cases shared in the Spiceworks Community.
Research on AI usage in small businesses
Spiceworks is an online community visited by millions of IT professionals in the trenches, who we often survey about their business technology use. Over the years, IT workers in SMBs have consistently told us they struggle with challenges stemming from a lack of time, budget, and time.
Because they’re often grappling with more pressing concerns, they don’t have the luxury to experiment with emerging technologies, like AI. When it comes to AI adoption, our research shows that smaller organizations currently lag behind enterprises, instead taking a “wait and see” approach.
In our 2025 Spiceworks State of IT report, we shared that 48% of enterprises (1000+ employees) deployed artificial intelligence, nearly double the adoption rate in the smallest organizations (<100 employees). But we expect to see adoption grow in the coming years: roughly one in five small businesses said they plan to start using AI within the next two years.
According to another study conducted by Aberdeen Strategy & Research (the research wing of our business), small organizations typically adopt AI through integrated AI functionality built into existing solutions. Additionally, Aberdeen reported that the top reasons small businesses implement AI are to reduce security risks and increase employee productivity.
Use cases for AI in small businesses
Artificial intelligence has so many different applications that it can be difficult for resource-challenged companies to know where to start.
To help companies ease their way in, the U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA), offers guidance on common ways “AI can help your small businesses do more with less” and “stay competitive in times of mounting inflation.”
- Proactively detect problems before they happen by monitoring environments for early signs of trouble
- Safeguard data by automating security tasks such as patching, because “the ability to quickly react to an attack … can make all the difference to your small business.”
- Make better-informed business decisions by analyzing business data for insights into strategic decisions
- Streamline repetitive tasks by improving processes and reducing busy work such as organizing emails, taking meeting notes, or scheduling meetings.
- Create business content by generating text, photos, or video for marketing materials, ads, or posts on social media
- Brainstorm new ideas by asking AI chatbots to conduct research, offer advice on common business problems, or weigh the pros and cons of a particular course of action
- Improve customer service by setting up chatbots to answer common questions or route requests to the right point of contact, which might improve the customer experience
How IT is already using AI
While broad advice from the SBA can help small business workers get started down the right path, real-world examples from the Spiceworks Community offer more specific examples of how AI is already having a direct impact on IT professionals’ jobs.
AI for IT troubleshooting
One time-consuming task for IT professionals is sifting through volumes of event logs to analyze trends or diagnose a problem. AI can dramatically accelerate this process. As IT manager, JoeBridgeman shared, “I used AI recently to ingest 3 days of event logs of a server and to describe to me what happened and what went wrong. That was faster than skimming it all myself.” Rapidly analyzing large amounts of data not only saves valuable time but might also resolve critical issues faster.
AI for explaining technical jargon to end users
Explaining complex computer terms to less tech-savvy end users can be a challenge for tech professionals. AI can also help with the soft skill of communicating technical concepts to non-IT colleagues. “Seriously, I am a ‘just the facts mam’ kind of guy,” IT manager Lonny6654 noted. “I have AI re-write many of my emails … and it makes my jargon more understandable for the common user … I just enabled email encryption for the company today. Copilot helped me write the announcement and instructions that I will be sending out.”
As to additional career benefits, he also noted that AI smooths the rough edges off of his communications: “People really want to know why I am so nice now.”
AI for IT purchasing
IT professionals are often busy troubleshooting issues, which means they don’t have much time for the often-tedious process of product research. Making an informed hardware purchasing decision can take countless hours of comparing specifications, reading reviews, analyzing costs, evaluating demos, and talking to vendors. AI can serve as a research partner that reduces a lot of the busy work involved in product comparison.
IT Manager, Rod-IT explained, “Let’s say you want a new access point (AP) but you’re stuck between 4 models. (Microsoft) Copilot will chart these for you, give you pros/cons of each, lay out costs, popularity, problems, firmware considerations, and so on.”
He also commented on the time savings he achieved using AI: “While you can do this yourself it takes much of the pain out of doing this… If you use it right and don’t take answers at face value, asking for clarity on how it got to that answer, and challenging it when you believe it is wrong, it will stand corrected and do the work again.”
AI for rapid retrieval of technical information
Unlike traditional search engines, AI chatbots can “think” through problems, potentially making their advice more relevant than Google search results. According to IT engineer, MachoManRandall: “I’ve found it useful for asking questions and getting a no BS response back in a quick manner. Even asking it to look at screenshots of text and tell me what it thinks I should do.”
He also commented that AI chatbots have saved him time sifting through advice on multiple websites. “ChatGPT has been a time saver for me no doubt… I installed the app on my phone and commonly used it over Google search because of how quickly it can get me to an answer or possible methods to try in regards to my question. Even my dumb questions usually get good results back, helping me get started on solving my question or brainstorming ideas on how to approach a situation.”
A CTO perspective: IT Innovation using AI for small businesses
Chief Technology Officers (CTOs) are responsible for developing and implementing an entire organization’s technology strategy, with an eye toward gaining competitive advantages through innovation.
We recently sat down with Joey Fortuna, CTO of Ziff Davis (our parent company) — who for years has worked with AI extensively by experimenting with various tools, developing AI policies, and helping various departments use AI to solve problems or work more effectively — for his take on potential benefits SMBs might realize through using AI.
How can AI benefit small businesses?
We asked Fortuna to discuss the impact of AI use on small and medium businesses and whether AI is primarily a tool for larger enterprises. Fortuna’s view is that AI-enabled tools and LLMs empower SMBs and level the playing field by giving smaller businesses many of the same capabilities as their larger peers.
“For small companies with very little in the way of resources, particularly human resources, AI is a great boon … I think AI makes a small company look like a big company in a lot of different ways … AI can analyze the data and come up with a recommendation in a way that wasn’t really easily possible before without a room full of statistics people to get the same results.”
How AI can help IT departments save money
Fortuna also believes AI can help small businesses save both time and money with tools that exist today. “With spend management, AI also shows promise. Platforms can analyze what IT spend looks like across your organization and say It looks like you’d do better if you did X or Y or Z. For example, Say you’ve only got 10 users on a platform, but you’re paying for 50 licenses. You might want to go for lower-tier pricing!”
AI expands the capabilities of small organizations
In particular, Fortuna was excited about AI tools expanding the capabilities of any employee or organization, making it easier to turn ideas into reality. To get this point across, he shared an anecdote about an employee who used AI to build an analytics tool in a single afternoon.
Previously, that app would have taken an entire team one week to develop. The most exciting part? No coding skills were required, just prompts. “It’s pure English, you know? It’s becoming increasingly accessible and easy to deploy apps. You just tell AI what you want, and it will do it.” Fortuna even cited ways AI can unlock creativity and fun: “You can even say, ‘sound like a pirate!’ and everything the tool says will sound like a pirate. It’s that easy.”
Can small businesses benefit from AI?
Based on our research and real-world examples uncovered in this article, it’s clear that AI can benefit SMBs in many ways today, both big and small. Whether you’re using an industry-specific AI solution (e.g., one built for healthcare, manufacturing, legal, retail, etc.) or if you’re using AI built into a general-purpose tool, AI use in the workplace is poised to grow rapidly in the coming years.
But with any technological advancement comes uncertainty and differences of opinion. We’ll leave you with one final insight that suggests once IT professionals get their hands on AI, they tend to like it.
In the 2025 Spiceworks State of IT study, we asked SMB IT pros who already use AI if they get value out of it. 60% of respondents said AI was “worth the investment” in time, effort, and cost, which leads us to believe AI might benefit you and your organization too.
