Depending on what you read, AI is either on the verge of solving nearly every problem we have or eventually bringing about the end of humanity. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of middle ground.
For most small and midsize businesses, though, the questions are a lot less dramatic. They’re trying to figure out what AI means for their business, where they should invest, and how quickly they need to move.
And I’m starting to wonder if a slowdown in AI development might actually be good for them.
The pace over the last few years has been almost impossible to keep up with. New models and capabilities are introduced constantly, and something that seemed cutting edge six months ago can suddenly feel dated. That makes investing harder. Why commit too heavily to one technology or approach when something significantly better might be right around the corner?
There are also some legitimate reasons for businesses to be cautious. Giving AI access to company information raises questions about security, permissions, governance and accuracy. And while large enterprises may have teams dedicated to sorting through all of this, most SMBs don’t.
The interesting thing is that access to AI really isn’t the problem anymore. The major platforms are relatively inexpensive and increasingly easy to connect to the applications businesses already use. Microsoft continues to integrate AI throughout Microsoft 365, while tools like ChatGPT and Claude can connect to business information in ways that would have required significant custom development not that long ago.
The technology is probably ahead of most businesses’ ability to use it.
That’s why I think a pause, or even just a slower pace of advancement, could be useful. It would give businesses some time to stop worrying about which model is going to win and focus on the things that will matter regardless of which model they ultimately use.
For me, that starts with management, not models.
Where are your employees wasting time? Where does it take too long to get an answer or make a decision? Which processes are unnecessarily manual? What information do people have trouble finding? Where could AI realistically make someone better or faster at their job?
Those are questions businesses can answer today. And none of them require predicting whether OpenAI, Microsoft, Anthropic or somebody we’re barely talking about yet will have the best model two years from now.
There’s another piece of this that we think is particularly important at StitchDX: the state of your company’s knowledge.
We’ve spent a lot of time over the past year talking about the connection between the intranet and AI readiness. The more we work with clients on this, the more obvious that connection becomes.
If your information is scattered across SharePoint sites, Teams, file shares, employee hard drives and who knows where else, AI is going to have a hard time making sense of it. The same goes for outdated content, inconsistent permissions, duplicate documents and information nobody really owns anymore.
AI doesn’t make those problems disappear. In many cases, it exposes them.
That changes the way I think organizations should look at their intranet and digital workplace. This isn’t just about giving employees a nicer place to read company news or find the HR handbook. Your intranet can become part of the knowledge foundation that AI uses to understand your business and provide useful answers to employees.
So even if you aren’t ready to make a major investment in AI today, there’s plenty you can be doing. Clean up and organize your information. Put some governance around it. Figure out who owns what. Look at your business processes and identify where AI could actually make a difference. Train your people. And make sure the digital workplace you already have is ready for what’s coming.
None of that work is wasted if the next generation of AI models turns out to be dramatically better than what we have today. In fact, it puts you in a much better position to take advantage of them.
Maybe that’s the real opportunity for SMBs right now. You don’t need to win the AI arms race. You need to get your business ready to use the technology when and where it makes sense.
And there’s already more than enough technology available to get started.
If you’re not sure how ready your organization is, our AI Readiness Assessment looks specifically at the foundation AI will depend on, including your knowledge architecture, content, governance and permissions. It’s designed to help identify the gaps you should address before making bigger investments in AI.