How small businesses can leverage AI

小型企业如何利用人工智能

This article is from Making AI Work, MIT Technology Review’s limited-run newsletter examining how to apply LLMs across industries. To receive it in your inbox, sign up here. 本文摘自《麻省理工科技评论》的限时通讯《让 AI 发挥作用》（Making AI Work），该栏目旨在探讨如何将大语言模型（LLM）应用于各行各业。如需订阅，请点击此处。

From accounting to design to market research and product development, there’s a staggering breadth of skills needed to run a business. A large company can hire experts to handle these tasks, but small businesses don’t always have this luxury. That’s where AI comes in. Today’s AI models do a decent job at these tasks. The trick for small businesses is to understand where AI is good enough and where it’s not. One place where a “good enough” AI can already be quite valuable to small business owners is in providing secretarial skills and handling basic administrative matters. Let’s take a look at how one private tutor is using it to improve his recordkeeping and free up his time. 从会计、设计到市场调研和产品开发，经营一家企业需要极其广泛的技能。大公司可以聘请专家来处理这些任务，但小型企业往往没有这种条件。这时，人工智能就派上了用场。如今的人工智能模型在处理这些任务方面表现尚可。小型企业的诀窍在于弄清楚人工智能在哪些方面“足够好”，而在哪些方面还不够。对于小企业主来说，人工智能在提供秘书服务和处理基本行政事务方面已经相当有价值。让我们来看看一位私人导师是如何利用它来改善记录工作并腾出时间的。

Case study

案例研究

Sam Finnegan-Dehn works in fundraising for a charity, but he moonlights as a math and philosophy tutor for university students from his home in London. Through this part-time business, he can leverage his degrees in philosophy and share his love of the subject with clients. But meeting with students is only a fraction of the work it takes to be a good tutor. He also plans lessons and finds fresh reading materials, creates assignments, sends invoices, and keeps up with new research—all on top of his regular job. Sam Finnegan-Dehn 在一家慈善机构从事筹款工作，但他同时也在伦敦的家中兼职担任大学生的数学和哲学导师。通过这份副业，他可以发挥自己的哲学学位优势，并与客户分享他对这门学科的热爱。但与学生见面只是成为一名优秀导师所需工作的一小部分。他还需要在完成本职工作之余，规划课程、寻找最新的阅读材料、布置作业、发送发票并跟进最新的研究成果。

Given these demands, Finnegan-Dehn doesn’t have as much time as he’d like to grow his tutoring roster. So he’s turned to AI for some help in managing the day-to-day aspects of his business. He says AI has taken on a secretarial role across all of his digital notebooks, where he jots down reminders about his clients’ progress and new readings to keep himself up-to-date. He describes using AI as kind of like having a second memory that helps him connect ideas he’s written down in various places. 鉴于这些需求，Finnegan-Dehn 没有足够的时间来扩大他的学生名单。因此，他转向人工智能寻求帮助，以管理日常业务。他说，人工智能在他的所有数字笔记本中扮演了秘书的角色，他会在笔记本中记下关于客户进度和新阅读材料的提醒，以保持信息同步。他形容使用人工智能就像拥有了第二个大脑，帮助他将记录在不同地方的想法联系起来。

While he has experimented with different tools like Claude and ChatGPT, he’s now landed on Notion AI because it integrates better with his tutoring notes, which live across his notebook tabs in the Notion app. Finnegan-Dehn doesn’t use AI to create teaching materials, but he does let Notion AI record meetings with his clients (after getting their consent), and then uses its automated summaries to refine his teaching strategy. For example, if he notices from the AI’s summary that it seems like a certain technique was not helping a student, he may change how he approaches the subject next time. 虽然他尝试过 Claude 和 ChatGPT 等不同工具，但他最终选择了 Notion AI，因为它能更好地与他的辅导笔记整合，而这些笔记都存储在 Notion 应用的各个标签页中。Finnegan-Dehn 不使用人工智能来制作教学材料，但他会让 Notion AI 记录与客户的会议（在获得对方同意后），然后利用其自动生成的摘要来优化教学策略。例如，如果他从人工智能的摘要中发现某种教学技巧似乎对某个学生没有帮助，他可能会在下次授课时改变方法。

Beyond this, Notion AI also helps him with goal-setting, drafting lesson notes, invoicing, and generating and syncing social media posts. For goal-setting, for example, Finnegan-Dehn says he understands his long-term goals for his business but not always the concrete steps to build to them. He uses AI to help fill in these gaps. He starts by writing down a “North Star” goal—say, to have a certain number of clients by the end of the year. Next, he asks his AI to generate the steps that he needs to take to get there, given the profile he has built up in the app. Then, he can reflect on the results and choose which tasks to tackle first. 此外，Notion AI 还帮助他进行目标设定、起草课程笔记、开具发票以及生成和同步社交媒体帖子。以目标设定为例，Finnegan-Dehn 说他了解自己的长期业务目标，但并不总是知道实现这些目标的具体步骤。他利用人工智能来填补这些空白。他首先写下一个“北极星”目标——比如，到年底拥有一定数量的客户。接下来，他要求人工智能根据他在应用中建立的资料，生成实现目标所需的步骤。然后，他可以反思这些结果，并选择优先处理哪些任务。

The tool Notion has been a big player in note-taking software for many years. Its AI add-on, released in late 2023, now has tools that enable it to interact with many other online productivity platforms. There’s an email client, calendar integrations, and a newly released agent. And while this level of access has raised privacy concerns, it can also make for a pretty powerful virtual assistant. Many of the tasks targeted by Notion AI are less creative and more rote: syncing information across documents or searching through old scribbles, for example. This makes the tool especially appealing to small business owners, who have limited bandwidth, particularly for menial work. Notion 作为笔记软件领域的佼佼者已经存在多年。其于 2023 年底发布的 AI 插件现在拥有了可以与许多其他在线生产力平台交互的工具，包括电子邮件客户端、日历集成以及新发布的智能体（Agent）。虽然这种访问权限引发了隐私担忧，但它也确实能成为一个非常强大的虚拟助手。Notion AI 针对的许多任务创造性较低，更多是机械性的工作：例如在文档间同步信息或搜索旧笔记。这使得该工具对带宽有限、尤其是难以腾出时间处理琐事的小企业主特别有吸引力。

Other companies are developing tools targeted at specific industries. For example, Grandma’s Quilt Shop in Yuma, Arizona, uses Rain, which has a software suite tailored to craft companies, to generate inventory descriptions and pricing for its stock of fabric designs. The owners claim this AI tool cuts the time it takes to list items by 60 to 80%. There are drawbacks, though, as Finnegan-Dehn described some of Notion AI’s idiosyncrasies as “clunky” at times. And the AI add-on for Notion costs $20 per month. As with all new tools, small business owners should carefully assess how the potential gains and headaches measure up against the cost of just doing the job themselves. 其他公司也在开发针对特定行业的工具。例如，亚利桑那州尤马市的“奶奶的被子店”（Grandma’s Quilt Shop）使用 Rain，这是一款为手工艺公司量身定制的软件套件，用于为其库存的面料设计生成库存描述和定价。店主称，这款人工智能工具将上架商品的时间缩短了 60% 到 80%。不过，它也有缺点，Finnegan-Dehn 就形容 Notion AI 的某些特性有时显得“笨拙”。此外，Notion 的 AI 插件每月收费 20 美元。与所有新工具一样，小企业主应该仔细评估潜在的收益和麻烦与自己亲力亲为的成本相比是否划算。

User tips

用户建议

Consider these points when thinking about whether AI might be able to help you run a business, or make any part of your work life just a little bit easier. 在考虑人工智能是否能帮助你经营企业，或让你的工作生活变得更轻松时，请考虑以下几点：

Look before you leap. Since LLMs feed on the data you input to answer your queries or complete tasks, you want to give them information in a way that’s convenient for you and for the model. For many of these notebook AI services, this means, for example, using their platform for notetaking so you don’t have to input or upload notes later. Because of this, it’s a good idea to weigh your options carefully before committing to an AI-powered ecosystem. 三思而后行。 由于大语言模型依赖你输入的数据来回答问题或完成任务，你需要以一种既方便自己又方便模型的方式提供信息。对于许多此类笔记本 AI 服务，这意味着你需要直接在它们的平台上记笔记，这样就不必事后再输入或上传。因此，在决定加入某个 AI 生态系统之前，仔细权衡你的选择是一个好主意。
Work to your strengths. Think about what skills you lack in-house, and see if AI can either help with training or take these tasks on for you. Just be aware: AI hallucinates and makes mistakes, so think about where accuracy is needed and keep humans in charge there. 发挥你的优势。 想想你内部缺乏什么技能，看看人工智能是否能提供培训帮助，或者直接为你承担这些任务。但请注意：人工智能会产生幻觉并犯错，所以要考虑哪些地方需要高准确性，并在这些环节保持人工把关。
AI isn’t always the best tool. It’s okay to use something off the shelf when that’s the better choice. It’s going to be safer, for example, to use existing payment processing platforms like Shopify or Square than to vibe-code one using AI. 人工智能并不总是最好的工具。 如果现成的工具是更好的选择，那就直接使用它们。例如，使用 Shopify 或 Square 等现有的支付处理平台，要比尝试用 AI 编写一个支付系统更安全。
Consider using local models for any sensitive information. Our reporting has covered the risks that online AI models have in leaking sensitive data, and there have been many reports about how AI companies collect your data when you ask their chatbots questions. Even if your business doesn’t handle personal information, there can still be some things you’d prefer not to share publicly. 对于任何敏感信息，考虑使用本地模型。 我们的报道已经涵盖了在线 AI 模型泄露敏感数据的风险，也有许多关于 AI 公司在用户向聊天机器人提问时如何收集数据的报道。即使你的业务不涉及个人信息，也可能有一些你不想公开的内容。