AI and automation shouldn’t be about replacing people, but getting rid of repetitive tasks that steal time in order to make people more productive, argues Ciarán Quilty from Intuit
Ask any small and mid-sized business owner what they’re short on, and they’ll probably say time. But more than the hours that are missing, it’s focus, clarity, and space to think. What’s stealing that bandwidth isn’t always obvious: an invoice you forgot to chase, a system that doesn’t sync, another tool demanding your attention.
“In our quest to counter the time thief, let’s stop asking ‘how do we use more AI?’ and instead, ‘how do we help more business owners get back to their purpose?’”
Time is rarely lost to a single catastrophic blocker but a thousand invisible cuts.
Less death by one decision and more by constant distraction.
The average SMB today operates with more digital tools than ever before. One of our own recent studies found that some will use eight or more tools. These aren’t only high-growth startups but also include solo founders, family firms, side hustlers scaling into storefronts.
Yet more tools haven’t meant more time. In fact, the opposite. When systems don’t talk to each other, the business owner becomes the middleware, chasing files, correcting errors, switching tabs. Hence it becomes harder to notice the time tax until you try to gain focus. And that’s the real problem we’re trying to solve with automation, both speed and focus.
What problem are we really solving?
Fragmentation both steals time and blocks progress. If data is scattered across platforms, AI can’t help you. If customer records don’t sync, your team spends its day fixing workflows instead of building relationships.
On the flip side of the tech transformation is a reality that many SMBs still don’t use basic digital tools. That’s not because they’re lazy or slow but because what’s on offer is often too complex, too disconnected, or too enterprise-focused to serve them.
There’s been a lot of noise about AI doing your work. But the most valuable thing AI might do is help you stop doing the things that don’t matter.
When we talk about automation, we should be honest: this isn’t about replacing people but clearing the underbrush. The repetitive, low-leverage tasks that keep business leaders from doing what only they can do.
AI becomes relevant less because it’s shiny and new, but because it helps you recover your attention. One example we’ve seen in practice: an AI agent notices a customer has been late paying six times in a row. Before you even hit send on the invoice, it flags this and suggests adding a late payment fee, a small change that increases your odds of getting paid on time by up to 10x. The cash comes in quicker. Your mental load drops. That’s intelligence in service of the real problem of getting paid faster.
The return on investment from AI is a secondary question
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the biggest barrier to AI isn’t cost but chaos.
If your data isn’t in one place, structured, connected, and accurate, AI has nothing to work with.
This is not a structural problem. The Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Index shows that many SMBs are incredibly resilient but deeply vulnerable to complexity. They create the majority of jobs yet remain the least equipped to benefit from the AI transformation unless we fix the basics.
We need action that supports better policies, simpler digital adoption, and clearer pathways to automation. But the principle applies far beyond any one initiative: if we want SMBs to thrive, we must stop assuming they’re ready to adopt tools built for enterprises.
AI is not the strategy but a lever. The question I often hear is “what’s the ROI on AI?” The better question is what do I care about, and how can technology help me spend more time on that?
Do I care about getting paid faster? Retaining more customers? Spending less time reconciling payments? Then let’s focus on automation there.
Don’t fall in love with the tech. Fall in love with the problem.
This is why the next wave of SMB innovation will come from simplifying the technology stack, connecting the dots, and making the right decisions easier to take.
Getting back to purpose and prosperity
We talk about entrepreneurship like it’s a heroic solo journey. In reality, it’s often one person doing five jobs, across ten apps, with twelve hours that should have been eight.
The opportunity here is less technical and more emotional. Imagine logging in and seeing your most urgent tasks already handled. Your insights surfaced for you. Your next move, clearer.
That’s a quiet revolution already underway and it’s built on a single principle: Business owners should spend more time being owners, and less time being operators.
In our quest to counter the time thief, let’s stop asking ‘how do we use more AI?’ and instead, ‘how do we help more business owners get back to their purpose?’
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