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Predictive analytics

More small business owners are using AI to run the numbers. Here’s how to do it well

Goldman Sachs launched an AI institute for small businesses. Its survey shows owners using AI for finances and planning, and rural owners catching up.

By Wiregrass AI4 min read

On Thursday, Goldman Sachs launched the Small Business AI Institute, with Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI as partners, to help small business owners put AI to work. It came with a survey of 2,473 graduates of Goldman’s 10,000 Small Businesses program, and its most useful finding is what owners now use AI for.

Writing marketing copy, an early favorite, is slipping. The fastest-growing use is financial analysis and business planning, which more than doubled in two years, from 18% of AI users to 42%. That’s where AI can help the most, and where a wrong answer costs the most.

What Goldman announced

  • The money. The institute is part of a new $500 million commitment that also extends 10,000 Small Businesses to another 10,000 businesses.
  • The training. The institute will build a learning series on applied AI with Anthropic and hold workshops for the program’s graduates. Google will offer its Grow with Google AI Professional certificate to almost 20,000 owners and their employees, with three months of free Google AI Pro. Meta will offer tools and training through Muse for Small Business, and OpenAI will hold workshops with the program’s community college partners.
  • Who can take part. Beyond the workshops for graduates, the announcement doesn’t say. The institute’s web page links to the 10,000 Small Businesses application.

What the survey found

  • Almost nine in 10 use it. 86% of the graduates surveyed use AI, up from 56% in 2024. Graduates are outpacing the average small business owner, the report says. For wider numbers, see most small businesses now use AI, but few have put it to work.
  • The work has moved to the numbers. Data analysis also rose, from 26% to 42%, while writing marketing content fell from 74% to 65%.
  • Few have gone deep. Only 15% of graduates say AI is fully integrated into their core operations, and 74% of those using AI have no formal policy for how employees use it.

Closer to home

Rural owners are catching up. 80% of the program’s rural graduates use AI, compared with 87% of the rest, and the gap has shrunk from 10 points in 2024 to 7. But rural AI users are more likely to say a lack of technical expertise keeps them from going further (47% vs. 39%), and less likely to use AI to manage customer relationships (16% vs. 28%).

That will sound familiar across much of the Wiregrass. Goldman brought 10,000 Small Businesses to Alabama in 2024 as part of a $100 million investment in rural communities, and this spring the Dothan Area Chamber of Commerce passed along the application deadline for the Alabama group. The program generally looks for more than $75,000 in yearly revenue, two or more years in business, and at least two employees, owner included.

One Alabama graduate, a hair salon owner, put the payoff this way in the report: AI “has helped me spend less time simply working in my business and more time thinking and operating like a CEO.”

Five ways to use AI on your numbers

  1. Start with a decision. How much to order for the holidays, which jobs make money, whether you can afford another hire.
  2. Make it show its work. Chatbots can still get math wrong and sound sure doing it. Ask for formulas, have it build a spreadsheet you can check, and tie totals to your books.
  3. Leave out what it doesn’t need. Remove account numbers and customer names, and use a plan or settings that keep your data out of training.
  4. Write down the rules. One page on which tools staff may use, for what, and who checks the results.
  5. Know when a chat isn’t enough. A chatbot gives you a one-time answer. If you’ll plan inventory, staffing, or cash around a forecast every month, it should come from a model trained on your history and tested on months it hasn’t seen.

Where we can help

Our predictive analytics service builds forecasting models from your own sales, operations, or equipment records. We test them on months they haven’t seen, so you know how accurate they are before you rely on them, and put the results in the tools you already use. If your team is just getting started, our AI strategy and training workshops teach staff to use AI for writing, research, and analysis on their real work.

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