These small-business owners are putting AI to good use

Mike Salvatore, owner of Heritage Hospitality Group in Chicago, used to run reports once or twice a year on the cost of goods for the two cafes, two bars and the bike shop he owns. He would spend hours crunching potential price adjustments manually, based on the expense of raw materials. Now, he does it every three weeks with the help of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Salvatore, who is 44 years old, also feeds information from both his point-of-sale system and from bookkeeping service QuickBooks into Google’s NotebookLM AI tool. The system makes a podcast about how the business is faring and how it could improve, which he shares with managers.

“It’s essentially my CFO," Salvatore said of AI. “Every day is a new use case."

While it is tough for Salvatore to quantify how much money AI has saved his company, he said he now employs one bar manager instead of two and didn’t replace an event planner who left earlier this year.

Large corporations have teams mapping out AI strategies and deploying the new technologies. Small businesses are figuring it out for themselves.

An August report from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that 58% of some 3,800 small businesses surveyed said they use generative AI. That is up from 40% in 2024 and more than double what it was two years prior.

Restaurants are using AI to schedule worker shifts. Event planners use it to make seating arrangements and provide quotes. Interior designers are using image-generation tools to visualize color changes or room layouts.

At the Story of Ramen, a cooking school in San Francisco, owner Manville Chan, 53, has AI serving as a customer-service representative. The school gets inbound emails from customers at all hours. Responding to them is a lot of work, but not enough to justify hiring an admin. About a year ago, Chan started experimenting with AI drafting emails and marketing materials, including blog posts and social-media content. The end goal was to have the technology respond to every customer inquiry.

Gemini, which Chan deemed better at interpretation, would read incoming emails to evaluate customer needs. ChatGPT, the more natural-sounding writer, would draft the replies.

For months, Chan had to manually review all the AI responses. He frequently caught hallucinations. Once a customer asked if the school would travel and host a class at their house: The school doesn’t do house calls but AI drafted a reply saying it would.

“There’s a lot of common questions that people ask but once in a while people ask some weird questions that are not coded in the system yet," says Chan. “If they don’t know the answer, they will invent something."

Over time though, Chan got better at prompting the AIs to respond with greater accuracy. Today, Chan only needs to edit 10% of the email replies before they go out; around 90% go out automatically and he spot-checks them after.

At Thread Logic, a custom-embroidered apparel firm located in a Minneapolis suburb, a young employee used AI to update the company website. The team wanted to reorganize information about each product, but the hosting platform had a set template that didn’t allow those changes.

“AI wrote the code for us and told us where to put it, and it worked," said owner Jeff Taxdahl, 61. “Five years ago, if we wanted to do this, it would have meant hiring a developer."

Lisa Gevelber, a Google vice president who runs Grow with Google, the company’s economic-opportunity initiative, said small businesses are “scrappier. They’re hungrier." Gevelber said construction companies she has talked to use tools like NotebookLM to map job sites, estimate the cost of materials and create blueprints for projects.

Dustin Bruzenak, CEO of AI advisory and software firm Modern Logic, uses AI to turn a biweekly podcast conversation with his business partner into short videos for social media and a blog post for the company’s website.

“From one hour out of an activity, we get an entire marketing campaign," Bruzenak, 44, said.

The Minneapolis-based company has six employees and hasn’t needed to hire much recently. There isn’t a need for a marketer, and the coding capabilities of AI mean he only needs people at the senior level.

“I don’t foresee ever needing to hire another junior engineer again," he said.

Write to Katherine Bindley at katie.bindley@wsj.com