With nearly 60% of small businesses currently using generative AI and 96% planning to adopt emerging technologies, artificial intelligence has become an essential tool for entrepreneurs. But as more executives experiment with AI, many are realizing that the hard part isn't learning the technology itself, but rather sifting through the noise and navigating the many platforms to turn AI's promise into actionable results.
According to Bill Furlong, founder and CEO of SquareStack and author of ASAP: AI in SMB, the challenge in successfully leveraging AI is “not so much code as it is connecting the dots.” Based on his extensive experience building and collaborating with small and medium-sized businesses on technology solutions, Furlong shared four practical ways for business owners to get started with AI thoughtfully and strategically.
start simple
To start your AI journey, focus on small, real-world tasks that will help you save time or find areas for improvement. Furlong advised starting with one file and one question. Upload your financial reports, sales materials, and internal forms and have AI analyze them. Here are some example scenarios and prompts that can be applied to different parts of your business.
- finance: “Here's last quarter's P&L. What trends and risks should we be looking at?”
- sale: “This is our sales deck. We recommend improvements for clarity and conversion.
- Human resources/administration: “Create a first-year employee evaluation template tailored to the role.”
- training: “Make a plan for how to educate your team about using AI in their workflows.”
These questions provide a starting point for building on the insights from the initial prompts and identifying additional use cases for AI.
“Upload it, ask questions and learn from it,” Furlong said. “Momentum is more important than mastery.”
[Read more: Leveraging AI for Business Idea Testing and Improvement]
Allowing technology tools to communicate with each other
Small businesses often rely on a patchwork of platforms for marketing, sales, accounting, scheduling, and operations. But without a way to integrate these disparate systems, it becomes difficult to gain comprehensive and meaningful insights from AI. In fact, more than 80% of IT leaders cite “data silos” as an obstacle to digital transformation, according to a Salesforce study.
Small businesses that treat AI as an iterative process rather than a one-time experiment tend to see the strongest results.
Platforms like SquareStack act as a “translator” across a small business’s technology stack, using an agent framework that connects and trains a company’s own software. This allows business owners to ask cross-functional questions and get answers from all internal data sources, rather than piecemeal manual input.
Furlong, a printing company, saves hours of manual reporting by building an agent that automatically aggregates weekly ad performance from Instagram and Facebook and shares summaries with its team. A real estate company created a similar agent to generate weekly reports from their scheduling software and agent workload. This allows us to balance the display and reduce bottlenecks.
“The magic is not in one tool, but in the way they communicate with each other,” Furlong says.
Be intentional about the data you enter (and where you enter it)
In “ASAP AI,” Furlong reminds small businesses that AI is only as good as the data it's fed, so it's important to audit inputs, set naming conventions, clarify decision-making rules, and keep documentation up-to-date when incorporating AI into workflows. By carefully controlling the flow of information to your AI tools, you and your team can use this technology safely, confidently, and with greater accuracy.
This recommended approach includes what Furlong calls “internal AI,” an AI platform that acts as a private personal assistant for your files, workflows, and use cases, with guardrails you build. External AI, on the other hand, is a public platform that scrapes data and analyzes it in ways that are “invisible, often manipulative, and often unregulated.”
“If an AI platform doesn’t know what it’s doing with user input, it’s probably not working in your best interest,” Furlong writes in his book.
[Read more: AI for Small Businesses: How to Stay Competitive]
Keep evolving and building AI outputs
Small businesses that treat AI as an iterative process rather than a one-time experiment tend to see the strongest results. Citing data from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Furlong noted that small and medium-sized businesses that engage in small, sustained adoption of AI see improved sales, profits, and employment.
Furlong advised starting with a few specific use cases and evolving those workflows as you learn from the results. The goal is for each AI interaction to surface the next opportunity for improvement.
“One prompt is never the end,” he told CO. “It's amazing how the answer reveals the next question.”
CO— aims to provide inspiration from leading and respected experts. However, before making any business decisions, you should consult a professional who can advise you based on your personal circumstances.
CO – is committed to helping small businesses start, operate and grow. Learn more about the benefits of small business membership with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. here.
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