On a Thursday morning at 5:30 AM, Alex sipped her latte, her elbows atop the service counter. Each day at this time, the sunlight through the front window blanketed her coffee shop and she enjoyed a few moments of peace and quiet before the morning rush began. With 30 minutes to spare before she corralled her baristas for their morning pep talk (and shot of espresso), she unlocked her iPad and pulled up her most valuable assistant: her small business dashboard. In seconds, Alex’s supply advisor scoured her accounts, sales and expense histories, local weather forecasts, event information, and past tourism data, and told her she would need five new sets of filters and 1,000 plastic cups for the coming week. She ordered them from Amazon with a single touch.
How AI Could Help Small Businesses
As technology opens the doors to vast troves of data, opportunities are emerging to create new insights on a small business’s health and prospects. Insights from this data have the potential to resolve two defining issues that have faced lenders and borrowers in the sector: heterogeneity—the fact that all small businesses are different, making it difficult to extrapolate from one example to the next—and information opacity, the fact that it is hard to know what is really going on inside a small business. And what if technology had the power to make a small business owner significantly wiser about their cash flow, and a lender wiser as well? What if new loan products and services made it easier to quickly and accurately predict the creditworthiness of a small business, much like a consumer’s personal credit score helps banks predict creditworthiness for personal loans, credit cards, and mortgages? What if a small business owner had a dashboard of their business activities, including cash projections and insights on sales and cost trends that helped them weave an end-to-end picture of their business’s financial health? What if this dashboard helped them understand all credit options they qualified for today and which actions they could take to improve their credit rating over time? And better yet, what if the dashboard, marshaling the predictive power of machine learning amassed from data on thousands of business owners in similar industries, could help a business owner head-off perilous trends or dangers?