Almost two years after the term Great Resignation was coined, many companies are still struggling to hire enough workers amid a historically tight labor market. That’s especially true for small business owners, who are increasingly taking a page from Silicon Valley by enlisting artificial intelligence to get the job done.
Main Street businesses are considering A.I. as an alternative to the rising labor costs that have been threatening many of them with closures for months. Their adoption of the technology would be a huge shift from how A.I. is currently used—mostly by large companies that have greater resources and are more on the cutting edge.
While only 11% of small business owners have tried A.I. to support their operations, 57% said they are eager to learn how generative A.I. products like ChatGPT could improve their business, according to a survey released Thursday by GoDaddy, an internet services company. GoDaddy interviewed 1,003 small business owners in April for the survey.
Owners interested in implementing A.I. will likely be encouraged by the results at other small businesses that have already tried the technology. Three quarters of the businesses that have used A.I. tools say they have performed at least very well, with only 4% saying their business has suffered as a result.
“Small business entrepreneurs are quickly finding that generative A.I. is already really well-equipped to assist them with the tasks they find most difficult to tackle, either because they don’t have the time or require skills outside their wheelhouse,” Gourav Pani, president of U.S. Independents covering U.S. entrepreneurship at GoDaddy, said in a statement.
Most owners said A.I. helped them delegate specific tasks like marketing, content writing, and customer service responses, freeing them up for other important responsibilities like growing customers and revenue. It speaks to a larger trend in which businesses are exploring how A.I. tools like ChatGPT and equivalents developed by tech giants Microsoft and Google can automate more repetitive and generic tasks.
A February report by job advice platform ResumeBuilder found that around half of business leaders were implementing ChatGPT, and half of those had already used it to replace some employees, whose tasks included coding, content creation, and customer support. Nearly all the companies surveyed said the strategy was saving them money, with 48% saying they’ve saved more than…
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