Goldman: Small businesses using AI say it has a positive impact — and not because it is replacing workers
There’s no shortage of economic uncertainty for the country’s small businesses, but many are surprisingly upbeat about the year ahead. A source for that optimism: artificial intelligence.
That’s what Goldman Sachs (GS) found in a survey of some 1,400 small business owners — and shared exclusively with Yahoo Finance ahead of the bank’s 10,000 Small Businesses summit in Washington, D.C., this week.
The results: Most small business owners (78%) say they’re optimistic about the next year despite there being no shortage of worries (rising costs, economic uncertainty, access to affordable capital), while almost all who say they use AI (94%) say it’s having a positive impact on their business.
“It saves us many, many hours a day,” Khari Parker, small business owner and co-founder of Baltimore-based restaurant chain Connie’s Chicken and Waffles, told Yahoo Finance.
Parker said between his three restaurant locations in the Baltimore area, AI tools like OpenAI’s (OPAI.PVT) Chat-GPT and Anthropic’s (ANTH.PVT) Claude are put to work for everything from designing menus and flyers to creating recruiting materials and training staff.
The models even play a big role in forecasting supply orders and acting as a “tiebreaker” when Parker and his business partner disagree.
“I definitely do not see it replacing team members, by any means,” Parker added. Across industries, large companies from tech and finance to retail have said that AI will reshape their workforce. But it remains a hot debate just how much AI has already slowed this year’s job market.
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Unemployment among younger college graduates has been rising this year as hiring in specific white-collar jobs has slowed. Some of the country’s largest companies, including Amazon (AMZN), Walmart (WMT), JPMorgan Chase (JPM), and Meta (META), have recently signaled they expect to grow revenue without adding more workers, and in some cases even while cutting headcount.
Goldman Sachs economists have warned that AI might bring “transitional friction” to the future job market.
Meanwhile, the bank’s senior executives sent a memo to staff, as seen by Yahoo Finance earlier this month, telling employees that it plans to “constrain head count growth through the end of the year” in addition to “a limited reduction in roles across the firm.”
The firm still expects to finish the year with a net increase in workers, a Goldman spokesperson said.
“Even if we can’t always measure it that precisely, there are definitely productivity tailwinds from AI,” JPMorgan CFO Jeremy Barnum told analysts earlier this month. The bank is aiming to “constrain head count growth,” Barnum said.
