Big Tech’s AI race will save small business owners time. It won’t find them customers

Eric Groves is the CEO and co-founder of Alignable, a networking platform for small business owners, and was a founding executive at Constant Contact. Alignable’s AI assistant, Allie, is named in this piece.

Meta, Google, OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to become the small business owner’s AI assistant. Meta brought its Muse agent to small businesses in September. Anthropic and OpenAI now package tools aimed squarely at owners, and Google is building the same features into tools millions of them already use.

That competition is good for Main Street. But it’s a race to save owners time, and time isn’t what keeps them up at night. What keeps them up is where the next customer will come from.

A word on where I sit. I run Alignable, a network of 10 million small business owners, so I have a stake in this argument. Alignable also co-hosts small business AI training with Anthropic, one of the companies named here. Read what follows with that in mind. But I also have something the assistants don’t: 13 years of data on how small businesses actually find work.

Start with where customers come from. In our surveys, members say about 85% of their customers come through referrals. Not ads, not search, not cold email. People who already trust them.

Across 35,000 local communities, our members have formed 226 million business connections. Most of them never become a relationship that sends work either way. The owners who grow through their networks aren’t the ones with the most connections. I’ve told owners for years that 50 warm relationships beat 500 cold........

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