How Small-Business Owners Can Adopt AI Solutions With Limited Resources

Research from McKinsey cites that 25% out of 2,400 business leaders surveyed stated that they increased artificial intelligence (AI) adoption due to the pandemic. Salesforce’s answer, so far, is to build and launch its own array of AI agents. This Agentforce business is showing early signs of traction with customers, so this company may be well placed to fend off the threat.

Does the company behind the solution truly understand your use case?

They can chat with multiple users simultaneously, providing needed information within seconds. As your first level of customer engagement and support, they provide an opportunity for responsiveness and efficient problem-solving. The key is using an advanced chatbot that is more like a warm and capable digital ally who is lively, engaging and has valuable answers and solutions in real-time.

• The right vendors tend to be the ones that have learned and built through firsthand experience.
• The EU AI Act creates a common set of laws across the European continent, but regulations in the U.S. may vary widely from state to state.
• AI-assisted software development is tipping the scales in the build-versus-buy debate.
• This evolution could enable companies to move from building prototypes to deploying production-grade software, without hiring an army of senior support engineers, he added.
• The key is using an advanced chatbot that is more like a warm and capable digital ally who is lively, engaging and has valuable answers and solutions in real-time.

Businesses must also make sure their solutions are being used responsibly. A provider whose tools are being used to engage in social scoring in China may still find themselves in hot water in the U.S. or Europe. Rule-based chatbots work on an if/then basis, meaning they are a bit like actors, delivering preprogrammed responses.

Like their rule-based counterparts, AI chatbots need to be trained with predefined responses, but that’s sort of like giving a growing child a basic vocabulary on which to build as they learn. As AI chatbots gain more practice, they can deliver a higher degree of sophistication. As online communication continues to grow, businesses must adapt to how they interact with customers.

But chatbot interactions should be empowering, allowing customers to express themselves with businesses online in a way that feels simple, convenient and natural. They should make it easy to resolve queries and problems in ways that leave customers feeling fully satisfied and heard. In fact, more than half of the respondents in a recent study by Forrester identified more satisfied customers as a top benefit for personalized customer service interactions, such as chatbots. With AI, it’s really not something you should aim to build yourself unless you know it is something you can definitively maintain over time because you have the necessary resources in-house. Think of it like building a product, with internal customers rather than external.

Your Business Uses AI—Do You Know Who Is Responsible For It?

Many of these were created using Bolt and similar AI coding services. AI chatbots also present an opportunity for training live representatives. For example, chat transcripts allow live representatives to see where interactions go well, or where they could go better, allowing them the ability to engage in follow-up.

Business Insider tells the innovative stories you want to know

“For some software, it’s becoming quicker to code my own version with AI than learn someone else’s non-intuitive, shit UI,” Casado wrote on X recently. For small-business owners especially, lack of access to these resources can impede efforts and reduce their ability to invest as much as they’d like into AI. Below, 14 Forbes Business Council members offer advice on how small-business owners can adopt AI without big data or programmers. Find examples of other organizations like yours benefiting from the solution. As ML models age, they begin to drift and start to make the wrong conclusions.

Make sure they can provide insight into similar use cases, and how they have benefited from specific features in unique ways. Ask if they can show you what your peers have accomplished by using the solution, and how that relates to your own organizational challenges. “You can now become a software developer without writing code,” Biilmann said. “That’s going to have a ripple effect on everything that’s been built.”

Only Adopt When You Are Fully Ready

Put your brand in front of 10,000+ tech and VC leaders across all three days of Disrupt 2025. Amplify your reach, spark real connections, and lead the innovation charge. It’s about making those early customers wildly successful so that they become champions of the cause. Risk-averse buyers will wait until others try it, and then eventually join in. Look for vendors that are heavily invested in making you successful, the kind that you would want to be a reference for down the line. Startups need first customers, but those customers want references.

How are those changes reflected to maintain accurate results over time? When buying an AI solution, ask the vendor how they keep their models up to date, and how they think about model drift in general. Enterprise AI solutions must be optimized for change over time to keep up with new and valuable data. In the world of finance, a model may have been trained to spot a specific regulation that changes along with new legislation. But because this is an emerging space that changes seemingly by the day, it can be hard for these potential users to know what questions they should be asking, or how to evaluate products so early in their life cycles. When a user sets out to buy a new piece of technology, they’re not particularly interested in what it might be able to do somewhere down the road.