From left to right: BSA Senior Director, IT Modernization and Procurement Jessica Salmoiraghi moderated a panel discussion that featured Walter Kuhn, Director, Federal Government Affairs, Shopify; Denise Lo, Vice President & Deputy General Counsel, Product, Engineering, Privacy and IP, HubSpot; David Blonder, Sr. Director and Associate General Counsel Privacy & Regulatory Affairs, Docusign; Combiz R. Abdolrahimi, Esq., Vice President & Global Head of Government Affairs & Public Policy, ServiceNow.
Small businesses can better harness artificial intelligence (AI) due to advances in technology that enable adoption and fuel growth, experts from Business Software Alliance (BSA) member companies told congressional staff this week on Capitol Hill.
As part of BSA’s Digital Transformation Network (DTN), dozens of staff joined a briefing on AI adoption and how it can improve and optimize small businesses. The briefing followed the publication of DTN’s latest report on the cross-sector impact of AI, “Small Companies, Big Difference: AI Adoption Transforms SMEs.”
“What you might not see, unless you’re a small business owner, is what happens with software behind the scenes,” BSA Senior Director, IT Modernization and Procurement Jessica Salmoiraghi said at the beginning of the moderated discussion. “And what we really want to talk about today is how business-to-business enterprise software can actually help these businesses succeed.”
Salmoiraghi moderated a panel discussion featuring Combiz R. Abdolrahimi, Esq., Vice President & Global Head of Government Affairs & Public Policy, ServiceNow; David Blonder, Sr. Director and Associate General Counsel Privacy & Regulatory Affairs, Docusign; Walter Kuhn, Director, Federal Government Affairs, Shopify; and Denise Lo, Vice President & Deputy General Counsel, Product, Engineering, Privacy and IP, HubSpot.
The panelists discussed how AI can impact all aspects of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) – from growth and innovation, to ensuring all businesses have access to cybersecurity tools that increase data security.
“After talking to hundreds of SMEs, HubSpot found that while AI needs to be easy to use, it also needs to be easy to trust,” Lo explained. “Small businesses want to use AI to grow easier and faster, but they also want to do it while maintaining the trust that they need to build with their customers.”
The panel echoed the need to build trust between companies and their customers. ServiceNow’s Abdolrahimi addressed how AI is enhancing customer engagement with seamless, personalized customer interactions, which can help SMEs deliver the best products and retain repeat customers.
“AI-powered analytics help identify customer demands and predict demand trends helping businesses adjust their offerings in real time,” Abdolrahimi said. “For small businesses, this means moving from a more reactive to proactive engagement.”
Representatives from ServiceNow and Docusign gave examples of cybersecurity tools that their companies are incorporating into their products so that businesses can have confidence that data is safe from threats.
“By embedding cybersecurity into your solutions from the outset, you’re providing transparency into your data practices, and you’re equipping small businesses with security tools,” Blonder said. “Our job is to ensure you can confidently harness the AI and benefits without compromising the safety of your team.”
HubSpot’s Lo and Shopify’s Kuhn explained that a key goal is minimizing the barriers to adoption of technology through more intuitive technology that guides users to address their company’s needs.
“Hopefully with the advent of AI — even if users don’t have any technical expertise at all —they can just tell the software, ‘This is what I want,’ and it will happen,” Kuhn said.
According to the DTN report, AI is saving SMEs nearly $275 billion annually. With SMEs representing 99 percent of all businesses, these improvements can help streamline demanding administrative responsibilities, enhance customer experiences, and boost cybersecurity capabilities.
Learn more about how AI can help SMEs improve their businesses in the most recent DTN report here.
