I want to say something that might surprise you coming from someone who spends her day's helping businesses adopt AI.

The way we are talking about AI right now is actively harming small businesses. Not the technology itself. The conversation around it.

We have built a hype cycle so loud, so full of billion dollar valuations and breathless headlines, that the average small business owner has been left feeling like they are already losing a race they never signed up for. And that feeling, more than any technical barrier or budget constraint, is what is genuinely holding businesses back.

Hype Was Designed for Someone Else

The AI conversation happening in the media, at conferences, and across LinkedIn was largely built by and for enterprise businesses, tech investors, and early adopters with engineering teams and experimentation budgets. It was not built for the owner of a twenty person recruitment business in Manchester, or a family-run logistics company in the Midlands, or a boutique marketing agency trying to stay competitive without burning out their team.

When those business owners encounter the AI conversation, they do not feel inspired. They feel behind. They feel like everyone else has already figured something out that they have missed. And so instead of taking a small, sensible step forward, they either freeze entirely or rush into something they do not understand because the pressure to act feels unbearable.

Neither response serves them well.

The Problem With "Move Fast" Advice

The dominant advice in the AI space right now is some version of move fast, experiment constantly, and disrupt yourself before someone else does. It is exciting advice if you have a runway, a technical co-founder, and investors who are comfortable with failure.

It is genuinely unhelpful advice if you are a business owner who is also the head of sales, the person who signs off the payroll, and the one answering client calls when something goes wrong.

Small businesses do not need to move fast. They need to move smartly. There is a meaningful difference, and the hype machine does not tend to make that distinction.

What Gets Lost in the Noise

Here is what frustrates me most. Underneath all the noise, AI genuinely does offer small businesses something remarkable. Not transformation overnight. Not replacing your team. Not some sci-fi future that requires a complete reinvention of how you operate.

What it offers is time. Recovered hours. The proposal that used to take half a day taking forty minutes instead. The weekly report that no longer requires someone to sit and manually compile it. The client email that gets a first draft in thirty seconds rather than twenty minutes of staring at a blank screen.

These are not glamorous use cases. They will not make the cover of Wired magazine. But for a small business owner, recovering ten hours a week across their team is genuinely life-changing. It is the difference between leaving the office at a reasonable time and being there until eight. It is the difference between having headspace for strategy and spending every day firefighting.

That story is not being told loudly enough, because it does not generate clicks the way "AI will revolutionise everything" does.

The Permission You Actually Need

If you have been feeling overwhelmed by the AI conversation, I want to offer you something that the hype machine rarely does: permission to go slowly.

You do not need to overhaul your business this quarter.

What you need is one small experiment. Pick the task in your week that drains you most. The one you put off, the one that takes longer than it should, the one that never quite feels done. Spend an hour seeing whether an AI tool can help with it. Not transform it. Not automate it completely. Just help.

That is a realistic starting point. And realistic starting points are the only ones that actually lead somewhere.

A Different Kind of Urgency

I am not saying there is no urgency at all. There is. Businesses that build familiarity with these tools now will have a genuine advantage over those that never try. That is real.

It is the quieter, more sustainable urgency of building a new habit. Starting small. Staying curious. Adding one capability at a time until the whole thing feels less like a threat and more like a toolkit you actually know how to use.

The businesses I see thriving with AI are not the ones who read every article and attended every webinar and tried to implement everything at once. They are the ones who picked something small, made it work, and then asked what was next.

That is a pace any business can match. And it starts not with a revolution, but with a decision to tune out the noise for a moment and just begin.

Marie Speakman is the founder of Finance Innovation Now, helping small and medium businesses cut through the AI noise and find practical, human-centred ways to grow.