Small Businesses, Discovered Dreams

The measure of achievement is not winning awards. It’s doing something that you appreciate, something you believe is worthwhile.

Julia Child

I love pumpkin pie, but I didn’t always, especially when I was very young and a chocolate torte was close by.  Now I can’t wait for that Thanksgiving dessert, that late autumn taste, orange-cayenne color, no matter how much dinner I consume.   

The problem with pies at Thanksgiving is in the choosing, more pies than guests.  After the long weekend’s leftovers are exhausted I won’t see pies very often.  In the heads down work week, that kid in a candy store, rather that kid in a bakery, is not a regular episode, at least not for the average family. But maybe Mom or Dad or Aunt Mary will conjure a pie, now and then.  

If you’re lucky, you live near a private Mom and Pop bakery, the kind that makes you wonder: How do they afford to stay open all year? How do they work round the clock, from on prem baking, oversight, and then a night of balancing books; how do they even have time for a small business strategy, or a plan for adaptation?

These little businesses were supposed to fade away.  We’ve heard that for the past twenty-plus years—no, the past century.  Or more.  An ethnic barista will be squeezed out of the coffee market, giving way to the green awnings and 15-person waiting lines.  If you can’t scale your barber shop, your red and white helix will topple under the weight of large franchises.  The baker will smother in his flour dust, as grocery shopping convenience is found in the supermarket cake and dessert sections. 

And yet, many of them refused to die. 

Those shops are still dotting Main Street, Rockwellian slices of Americana.  The genesis of many small shops was borne of the entrepreneurial dream.  Those that survive stand like prize fighters who take incessant punches without falling.  It’s an exhausting dream, a daily slog, a self-actualization that is often unattainable.

Small businesses are the lifeblood of an innovative economy.  They are the motivators for large businesses to improve.  They are ankle-biters that can’t be ignored.  And they comprise are interconnected, interdependent ecosystem.  

And now, thanks to AI, the small businessperson can accelerate the climb toward self-actualization.

Trepidation with the New

Many shop owners, and even many corporate executives, reference AI like it’s Arthur C. Clarke’s Space Odyssey monolith, inspiring ancient homo-sapiens to take the next evolutionary leap.  It is cataclysmic fortune and transformation.  Or on negative days, it is the Borg, assimilating knowledge and shaping all exchanges into a cookie cutter wrapper.  There is no shortage of AI hyperbolic predictions. Most of it is vague, unspecific, overly generalized.

When GenAI mimicked a personality and conversed with us, replacing clumsy searches by browser-dependent keywords, we took a moment to digest.  We entered AI philosophical debates regarding future risks, while those seeking more optimistic opportunities invested in the AI tech du jour. Much of this went overlooked by the small business baker on Main Street who was heads-down, proud yet fatigued, juggling sole-proprietor stresses and moments.  The thinking was that AI was for the big guys, not the small.  That short-sightedness and the timid complacency of small players were understandable but sadly unfortunate.   A missed opportunity. This is beginning to change.

AI represents a journey whose roots began 75 years ago. While we can't say AI existed in the 1950s since the technology was no more than static rule sets. But computational theory launched an exciting adventure in our universe. Further maturity came in the form of expert systems, provoking a generation of machine learning.  Deep neural networks followed from around 2010 and later, emulating brain structures. Then came the explosion and integration miracle -- foundational LLMs.  

These models have propelled the agentic AI revolution.  It was a journey, but this revolution has reached the small business players. AI is not reserved for just the corporate giants.  The agentic revolution is accessible to the Main Street bakery -- a small competitor perhaps, but a true competitor, nonetheless.

Your roadmap to understanding customers, modest or titanic, is the anatomy of their operation, discovering what 2:00AM nightmares urged the baker’s insomnia. That small bakery, whose outcomes are caloric masterpieces, are now positioned to warp ahead.  Not only do they have access to AI.  Their opportunity has never been greater.

Present Day Small Business

Proof of the coming small business boon are the investment trends for micro-SAAS agents.   They are as plentiful as the stuffing on the table. For monthly prices that cost less than your Thanksgiving bird, they can have basic agentic AI that will offload hours of a small staff -- from predictive analytics assessing ebbs and flows of walk-in traffic as holidays approach, the impacts of snowy weather, bulk forecasting of baking staples in a supply chain that can eat away at margins.  They can have marketing opportunities with action – not simply advice – to post coupons, weave stories into social media.

We didn't think of that toque-wearing businessperson in the kitchen as an AI customer. She is. Knowing her environment is knowing how to rapidly institute process excellence. While most consultants will ignore the small change opportunity of the small store, it is an opportunity with a ladder to other supply chain actors.

When the AI buzzword took the planet by storm, less- than-impressed investors forgot the tech-game is the long game.  Certainly, there are small pockets of panic, and reflections about the dot-com bubble of past.  But while rating agencies and advisory giants view the world in macro lenses, perceptive consultants qualify and personalize, personalize, and personalize again, differentiating opportunities and scaling them throughout the small business market.

It’s not a surprise to see the yawns during requirements-planning tracks at conferences; most attendees are in the rotunda witnessing blockbuster announcements about gaming simulations, AI artistic pageantry, and appearances by humanoid robots serving some CTO a cup of coffee.  But take a cue from the baker who’s providing you tomorrow’s late day pièce de résistance.  Innovation comes incrementally. Most clients are skittish about spending months deciding how to introduce large-scale AI. Sales innovation is finding the clients who want to see AI operate tomorrow in their modest shop.

Living the Dream

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs (basic survival, security, belonging, esteem, self-actualization) is often seen as the "four-fulfilled, fifth elusive." Not enough individuals see themselves achieving self-actualization. And it's no wonder.   Our daily work can be our daily grind. The stressful morning wakeup is on a lower rung of his hierarchy. For the baker who is scrambling this week, under the gun of the holiday rush, technology's recent evolution, AI micro-services, is enabling the dream, the lifestyle dream -- accessible and hopeful.

That small town baker is not considered a major player or contributor to the AI evolution.  And that is a mistake.  A small business owner’s foray into AI is the manifestation of an innovator. With the help of agentic AI, streamlining her forecasting, aligning to supply chain efficacy, taking toil out of the mundane, she is then free to create.  

She crafts magic for your Thanksgiving Day, thereby living her dream -- from putting food on her own family’s table, and then on ours. That dream was perhaps everything she imagined when her ten-year-old self looked into the display case of colored petit fours, and pleated truffle wrappers, all surrounding the case’s queen – a multi-layered chocolate torte, for the young ones who haven’t quite learned to appreciate the immortal pumpkin pie.