In this episode of the podcast we are taking a leap into the thorny but very pressing issue of artificial intelligence – and specifically for founders, new founders, and small-business owners. I get so many pitches about AI, and every day there is at least one AI story on the news wires
COSBOA and many other small-business advocates are warning that AI is not a level playing field, and that there needs to be more investment in education and training for small businesses to help them embrace AI.
I spoke to a subject expert to identify, and discuss, the most pressing issues for new founders and small-business owners around AI. And I chatted with a small-business owner to learn how AI has transformed a number of aspects on her day-to-day operations and freed up big chunks of her time so she can focus working ‘on’ her business rather than ‘in’ it.
Pulkit Agrawal is the founder of UR Digital and of Ingressi. UR Digital is a well-established award-winning SEO agency in Sydney, and Ingressi allows you to see how many humans and bots came to your website via AI.
Pulkit’s biggest concern is that a lot of small-business owners, while they understand they need to use AI, are not necessarily using it in the most competitive or productive way. He bemoans the fact that most small-business owners focus on AI for content creation. This, he warns, detracts from founders putting their own distinctive stamp on their content and means that their unique voices get lost in a sea of similar-sounding AI-driven content.
Independent thinking
He sees the bigger opportunities for small-business owners to benefit from AI in agentic systems and Model Context Protocols (MCPs). Agentic systems are capable of independent thinking. So, you can use agentic workflows to make intelligent decisions. Pulkit runs webinars on a monthly basis and he has been able to automate the entire process with the help of agentic systems. This has allowed him to save 12 man hours every month.
And for those worried about AI ‘taking over’, a business owner can build whatever level of approvals they want into agentic systems, so the systems will suggest something but the owner can review those suggestions before they are enacted.
Pulkit describes MCPs as being like a USB-C plug where one plug can actually connect to multiple systems. They enable you to connect your CRM, accounting software, Large Language Model (LLM) – such as Claude – so you are using a plain language to talk to your data.
Taking away the pain of manual, repetitive processes
Aida Rejzovic is the founder of Sassy Organics, the Melbourne-based toxin-free retailer she established in 2016. The online store offers more than 3,000 carefully curated natural, organic, vegan and cruelty-free products across beauty, wellness, baby and home.
And monitoring prices, ingredients, compliance status and other aspects of those 3,000+ products used to be a manual process that was painful and very labour-intensive. Now, Aida uses am MCP as a control connector between AI and her website. She can do product updates across multiple products at once and maintain that data better. So, if, for example, Aida receives information from a supplier that a product has changed in terms pricing or ingredients list, she can get AI to verify all the products in that brand and list changes that are to be made. Once she’s comfortable with changes and they’re verified, the AI can update all that information through her MCP instantly without her and her team having to do it manually product by product.
I hope this episode of the Small Biz Fix helps demystify AI and clarifies its most useful applications for micro- and small-business owners.
