Small businesses employ almost half of all Americans working in the private sector—and in the past decade, they’ve created an outsized share of new jobs. These are the local restaurants, doggie daycares, florists, salons, and construction companies that create good jobs and are the fabric of our day-to-day lives.

They are community anchors everywhere, but are especially critical employers in historically-disadvantaged neighborhoods in our cities and in the small towns that dot our country.

Yet despite their economic and social importance, these 33M small and mid-sized businesses have been poorly served by the HR tech that powers big business. That’s because historically SMB owners viewed talent management and learning solutions as unhelpful in doing the one thing they care most about: keeping their business alive and growing it.

Take a dog day care owner. They’re not going to buy a general business in a box course when what they need to learn is specific to running a facility with live animals. And they’re not going to ask a very busy hourly employee to take a general business course when what the real need is teaching them how to safely handle dogs.

But with Generative AI’s human-like reasoning, conversational interfaces, and creative powers we can now design hyper personalized solutions at scale. For example, we can build learning experiences that zero in on the brass tacks of running a specific business, and that will move these solutions from nice to have for small businesses to must have.

Until now, small businesses have been poorly served by the tech that helps larger companies grow, train up workers, and run efficiently because they don’t have the kind of scale needed to make enterprise solutions work. Available talent management solutions have been prohibitively expensive because of the high costs of customization. Large corporations could afford tailored HR systems and talent management programs, while smaller businesses were left with one-size-fits-all approaches that often fell short.

AI, however, changes that.

In large part because the shift towards a service-as-software model—where services that could previously only be done by humans can be replaced partially or fully by technology—means that services companies can now operate on tech company margins and scale. And the difference between the two is large, with around 75%-plus margins for tech versus 30% for services. That suddenly makes HR and learning solutions that require a tremendous about of personalization for the business and the employee much cheaper to create and deliver.

Here’s just a few of the things we could now do:

• Provide personalized business coaching to owners starting and growing their business. Most SMB owners are passionate about what they do, but are not experienced in the ins and outs of starting and running a business. AI companions can be like having dozens of been-there-done-that experts at their fingertips at all hours.
• Implement personalized learning and development. AI can create tailored custom onboarding and learning paths for each employee, ensuring more effective skill development and career progression. Large enterprises have had quality solutions for years — now SMBs can too.
• Enhance recruitment and hiring. AI-powered tools can write job descriptions, sift through resumes, conduct initial screenings, and even predict candidate success, dramatically improving the efficiency and effectiveness of the hiring process.
• Improve performance and retention. Continuous feedback systems driven by AI can provide real-time insights into employee performance and sentiment, enabling timely interventions and support.
• Employ guided agents capable of executing full workflows. AI agents can execute full workflows at low cost, like executing HR tasks, authoring marketing campaigns, and doing sales outreach. These can and will replace people—but will also shift many people’s roles to more creative, strategic work of growing a business.

There’s a huge opportunity here both for market growth and social good—let’s start building for the fifty percent of the workforce in small businesses.