For decades, the advantage went to businesses with the most people, money, and resources. AI is rewriting those rules.
I’ve spent more than 20 years building businesses, investing, and working in real estate. During that time, I’ve watched technology completely change the way companies operate. From the internet and social media to smartphones and automation, each major shift has created opportunities for entrepreneurs willing to adapt.
But I believe artificial intelligence represents something different. We’re not just getting another tool to help us work faster. We’re getting access to technology that can fundamentally change how businesses are built, managed, and scaled.
For most of my career, growing a business meant growing a team. More employees, more departments, more meetings, more systems, and more overhead. That was simply the cost of doing business. Today, AI is challenging that assumption.
A small team with the right technology can accomplish things that previously required an entire organization. Research, marketing, customer communication, content creation, data analysis, and administrative tasks can all be handled more efficiently. The result isn’t just lower expenses. It’s the ability to move faster, experiment more often, and focus on the work that actually creates value.
And for entrepreneurs, that’s a pretty big deal.
Disclosure: Some links in this article are referral links. I may earn a commission if you sign up through them, at no additional cost to you. I only recommend tools I believe provide value.
The Real Opportunity With AI Is Leverage
Entrepreneurs have always looked for leverage. We use capital to invest, employees to expand our capabilities, and technology to make operations more efficient. AI introduces an entirely new level of leverage because it helps scale something that was traditionally difficult to replicate: our ability to think, create, analyze, and execute.
Consider what happens when you have a new business idea. In the past, you might spend weeks researching competitors, developing a business plan, creating marketing materials, and figuring out how to test the concept. Today, AI can help you work through much of that process in hours.
You can research a market, evaluate competitors, brainstorm positioning, outline a business model, develop an offer, and create a preliminary marketing campaign before you’ve spent a dollar on advertising.
Does that mean AI will give you all the right answers? Absolutely not. You still need experience, judgment, and a willingness to test your assumptions in the real world. But the time and cost required to get started have dropped dramatically.
The advantage increasingly belongs to entrepreneurs who can turn ideas into action faster than everyone else.
That’s why I believe AI is going to create enormous opportunities for small businesses, independent entrepreneurs, and lean teams. You no longer need a massive organization to compete with larger companies in many areas. You need good ideas, the right systems, and the ability to execute.
Stop Using AI Like Google. Start Using It Like a Team
Most people start using AI by asking questions. They want help writing an email, researching a topic, or coming up with a few marketing ideas. That’s useful, but it’s only scratching the surface.
The bigger opportunity comes when you stop thinking of AI as something you occasionally ask questions and start thinking of it as something you can assign work.
I like the idea of building a team of specialized AI assistants, each responsible for a different part of the business. One might help develop marketing strategies, another might analyze investment opportunities, and another might organize operations or research competitors.
The goal isn’t to replace your team or eliminate human judgment. It’s to free people from repetitive work so they can focus on higher-value activities.
For example, marketing is one of the areas where AI can make an immediate impact. Instead of starting every campaign from scratch, you can use AI to develop ideas, draft content, organize messaging, and test different approaches. Your team still decides what’s worth publishing, but the creative process becomes significantly faster.
I use tools such as GoHighLevel to bring marketing, lead generation, customer communication, and follow-up systems together. Combining those systems with AI creates opportunities to make a business more responsive without requiring someone to manually manage every interaction.
Put it into action: We implemented an AI-powered chatbot using GoHighLevel to make our website more interactive. Visitors can ask questions rather than only browsing static pages. The idea is to make it easier to find useful information and decide what to do next. It is an example of using AI to improve how a business communicates, rather than simply automating an internal task.
And that’s the distinction that matters. The goal isn’t simply to automate tasks. It’s to create a better experience for your customers while making your business easier to operate.
The Business That Gets Smarter Every Day
One of the biggest opportunities I see with AI has very little to do with generating content. It’s about organizing knowledge.
Every business accumulates an enormous amount of information. Customer questions, sales objections, operating procedures, training materials, successful marketing campaigns, mistakes, and lessons learned. Unfortunately, much of that information ends up scattered across emails, documents, conversations, and the memories of key employees.
What happens when someone leaves? Often, a lot of that knowledge leaves with them.
AI creates the possibility of building a business where information becomes easier to capture, organize, and reuse.
Imagine a new employee being able to ask an internal AI assistant how a particular process works and receive an answer based on your company’s actual procedures. Or a marketing assistant that understands your brand voice, target customers, and previous campaigns. Or a business owner who can quickly analyze recurring customer questions to identify opportunities for improvement.
These are the kinds of applications that interest me most because they make the entire organization more effective.
Put it into action: One of the easiest ways to get started is to ask your favorite AI assistant, whether that’s ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or another platform, to interview you about your business. Have it ask questions about your company, services, processes, customers, and common challenges. Use those answers to build a centralized knowledge base that your team can reference. With the right setup and access controls, employees can get answers faster, reduce unnecessary back-and-forth, and spend more time getting things done.
Here’s a prompt to get you started. Just copy and paste it into your favorite AI assistant:
“Act as my company’s AI knowledge architect. Your job is to help me build a comprehensive knowledge base for my business that can eventually be used to train employees, answer questions, improve operations, and power AI assistants. Start by interviewing me about my company, including our history, products, services, customers, team, daily operations, sales processes, marketing, technology, policies, and frequently asked questions. Ask me questions one at a time, including follow-up questions when you need more information. Don’t make assumptions or invent answers. Once you have a thorough understanding of my business, organize everything into a structured company knowledge base with clearly labeled sections, processes, FAQs, and standard operating procedures. Identify any missing information or areas that need clarification. Then help me turn this knowledge base into a practical resource my team can use and continuously improve.”
Once you’ve built your knowledge base, you can use it as the foundation for an internal AI assistant, employee training, customer support, and other automations. Review the information for accuracy and remove sensitive details before sharing it with employees or connecting it to AI tools.
Tools like Manus are also pushing AI beyond simple conversations and toward more involved research and multi-step tasks. That’s an important development because entrepreneurs don’t just need answers. They need work to get done.
The real competitive advantage isn’t having access to AI. Eventually, everyone will have access to similar technology.
The advantage will come from how well you’ve integrated that technology into the way your business operates.
Why Smaller Teams May Have the Biggest Advantage
For years, business success was often measured by size. How many employees do you have? How many offices? How big is your organization?
But size creates complexity. More people require more communication, management, coordination, and overhead. Sometimes that’s necessary, but it isn’t always an advantage.
AI creates an interesting alternative: what if you could grow revenue and improve customer service without increasing the size of your organization at the same rate?
A small team equipped with AI can now create marketing campaigns, develop presentations, organize customer information, research new markets, and manage recurring administrative work much more efficiently.
Even relatively simple tools can make a difference. I like Granola for capturing and organizing meeting notes, and Wispr Flow for turning spoken thoughts into text. Instead of spending time manually documenting every conversation or typing out every idea, technology can help capture information while you focus on the actual discussion.
For presentations and business materials, tools such as Gamma can help turn ideas into structured presentations and documents much faster than traditional workflows.
None of these tools replaces the need for good thinking. They simply reduce the amount of time between having an idea and doing something with it. And when you multiply those small efficiencies across an entire business, the impact can become substantial.
The Hidden Cost of Doing Things the Old Way
One of the most expensive things in business isn’t payroll, advertising, or office space. It’s the time spent doing things that no longer need to be difficult.
Think about how many hours disappear each week into scheduling, writing emails, preparing reports, researching information, organizing meetings, and following up with people. Individually, these tasks don’t seem particularly expensive. Collectively, they can consume a significant portion of your working life.
The opportunity with AI isn’t to become busier by filling every available hour with more tasks. It’s to get some of that time back and make a deliberate decision about what to do with it.
Maybe that means developing a new business. Maybe it means spending more time with customers, improving your product, or building stronger relationships. Or maybe it means creating a business that doesn’t require you to work every waking hour.
I’ve always believed that the point of building a successful business isn’t simply to create more work for yourself. It’s to create opportunity and freedom. AI can help move us closer to that goal, but only if we’re intentional about how we use it.
When Everything Becomes Easy, Being Different Matters More
There’s an important downside to all of this. When everyone can create articles, advertisements, presentations, and videos in seconds, the world gets flooded with more content.
More doesn’t necessarily mean better.
In fact, I think AI is going to make average work increasingly worthless. If everyone can generate a polished marketing message, having a polished marketing message is no longer a competitive advantage.
The same goes for generic blog posts, repetitive social media content, and business ideas that look exactly like everyone else’s.
What becomes more valuable? Original thinking. Experience. Trust. Relationships. Creativity. Judgment. The ability to understand what customers actually need.
Those are things technology can support, but not automatically provide.
This is also why I don’t believe entrepreneurs should use AI to remove themselves entirely from the creative process. Your perspective matters. Your experiences matter. The lessons you’ve learned from building businesses, making mistakes, and solving real problems matter.
AI can help you communicate those ideas more efficiently. But the ideas still need to come from somewhere.
The goal isn’t to use AI to become more like everyone else. It’s to use AI to become better at what makes you different.
Where I’d Start If I Were Building a Business Today
If you’re an entrepreneur trying to figure out where AI fits into your business, my advice is simple: don’t start by buying a dozen subscriptions or trying to automate everything.
Start by identifying where your business is losing time, money, or momentum. And one of the easiest ways to do that is to let AI help you figure it out.
Here’s how to get started:
- Let AI get to know your business. Ask it to interview you about your company, customers, operations, marketing, and biggest challenges. Answer its questions so it understands how your business actually works.
- Find your biggest opportunities. Once AI understands your business, ask it to identify where you could save time, reduce costs, improve results, or create new opportunities for growth.
- Pick one and take action. Have AI rank the opportunities by potential impact and ease of implementation. Choose the one that makes the most sense and ask it to walk you through putting it into action.
Put it into action: Open your favorite AI assistant, whether that’s ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or another platform, and copy and paste this prompt:
“Act as my AI business strategist. Interview me about my business, including our products, services, customers, operations, marketing, team, and biggest challenges. Ask me questions one at a time until you have a clear understanding of how my business operates. Then identify the 10 biggest opportunities to use AI to save time, reduce costs, improve customer experience, or grow revenue. Rank them by potential impact and ease of implementation, and help me implement the best one.”
That’s it. You don’t need to know anything about AI to get started. You just need to be willing to answer some questions and experiment with the results.
Once you have your list of opportunities, choose one problem and start there. If marketing is your bottleneck, explore how AI can help develop campaigns and content. If you’re spending too much time in meetings, look at tools that capture notes and organize action items. If customer follow-up is inconsistent, explore how AI and automation can improve your systems.
Then measure whether the change actually helps. Did it save time? Improve quality? Reduce mistakes? Create a better customer experience?
If it works, keep it. If it doesn’t, try something else.
You don’t need to become an AI engineer to benefit from artificial intelligence. You need to understand your business well enough to recognize where technology can create value.
I’ve put together a collection of the tools I use and recommend on my AI, Technology & Business Resources page. It includes tools for marketing, automation, content creation, productivity, and operating a business more efficiently.
It’s a good starting point if you’re looking to experiment without getting overwhelmed.
The Future Belongs to Entrepreneurs Willing to Adapt
Over the last two decades, I’ve seen businesses transformed by the internet, social media, mobile technology, and digital marketing. Every major shift created winners and losers, and the difference often came down to how quickly people were willing to rethink the way they operated.
I believe AI is another one of those moments, potentially an even bigger one. But I don’t think the winners will necessarily be the entrepreneurs who understand the most about machine learning or know every new AI tool.
I think they’ll be the ones who stay curious, experiment consistently, and remain willing to challenge assumptions about how business should work.
The tools will change. The technology will improve. Many of the platforms we’re using today may look completely different a few years from now. What won’t change is the value of solving meaningful problems, creating great customer experiences, and building businesses that people actually want to work with.
That’s where the real opportunity is.
AI gives us more leverage than we’ve ever had before. What we choose to do with it is still up to us.
The question isn’t whether AI will change the way you do business. It’s whether you’re willing to change with it.
Oliver Graf is a real estate entrepreneur, investor, founder, and host of the Founders Club podcast. He shares insights on AI, technology, entrepreneurship, investing, and building businesses.
Explore more: Oliver’s Favorite AI & Business Tools