AI Training for Small Business Owners: What You Need to Have in Hand Before You Start

You know you should get trained on AI. You may have a course bookmarked, a workshop on the calendar, or a stack of videos you keep meaning to watch. What you probably do not have is a clear picture of where your business stands today, and that is what decides whether any of the training sticks. This is the gap in AI training for small business owners, and it opens before the first lesson starts.

I believe in training, no matter what. If you do not know something, go learn it. Everyone should be learning all the time. I also believe training has to land on something. When there is nothing for it to land on, you walk out with notes and no change. I have not yet met an owner who started with a clear picture of where the business stood. They start with two questions: how can AI help me, and what can it do? Those are fair questions. They are just not the first ones.

Why Training Without a Starting Point Falls Flat

Goldman Sachs launched its Small Business AI Institute with a $500 million commitment. The Institute works with Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI, and it focuses on AI education, research, and access to capital. Goldman's own numbers show why. In the Institute's report, 86% of the alumni it surveyed use AI, up from 56% in 2024. Only 15% have fully integrated AI into their core operations. Meanwhile, 77% said more training and resources would help them.

Read the first two numbers side by side. Nearly everyone is using AI, and very few have built the business around it. Using AI and running on it are two different things.

A fair warning about those figures. Goldman surveyed graduates of its own business program, and the report says the results may not represent all of its alumni. The same report says these owners are adopting AI faster than the average small business owner. So if only 15% of them have integrated AI, the typical owner is further back than that.

AI training for small business owners is the right response. What matters is what you bring to it. Training handed to an owner who does not know where the business stands is a lecture. Training handed to an owner with a goal and a process laid out is a working session. You need to know where you are on the map before you know which direction leads to your destination.

What Starting Without a Plan Cost Me

I have started a couple of businesses without knowing much. I had an idea and some skills, and I went with it. My home improvement business is the clearest example.

I was young, and I jumped in with no guidance. I did not look at anything or put together a business plan. I just started doing work for people. I started with friends and clients, and the work I did earned me more work. That part went fine. I had a big vision of where the business would go, but I did not have the step-by-step plan to get there. I had no capital to go after bigger jobs, and I had no network to help me find those jobs or get my name out. The business stayed hand-to-mouth, and I was never able to grow it.

My biggest miss was not skill. I did not have a solid plan, and I did not know where I stood or what I needed to do about it. Looking back, I wish I had written that plan down and talked to more people before I started.

Goldman's program for small business owners lines up with those same three gaps. Its press release describes delivering education, access to capital, and support services, and its report says 84% of alumni do business with other graduates.

Start With Your Goal, Because Not Every Owner Wants to Grow

I talked with a photographer who has around 300 clients. I asked her whether she would want to automate anything. She said no. If automatic emails went out to her clients about photographs, she told me she would be overwhelmed and overrun, and she could not keep up with that much demand. She prefers it when clients come to her, because then she can manage the flow. She makes the money she wants, and she has no plans to grow.

I have met other owners like her. They are happy with what they built. They have the life they want, and they do not want the headaches that come with a big operation and a crew of employees. They like being solo.

Not every business wants to grow, and nothing is wrong with that. Some owners just want more time. I think life balance matters whatever choice you make, and this is where AI can help. Hand off the tasks you do not need to do yourself, and spend that time with your family or wherever you want to be.

When an owner asks whether AI can do something, my answer is often yes. The bigger questions are whether it should, and whether you need it. The answer depends on where you want to go. An owner who wants to grow will build different things than an owner who wants a few basic tasks off the plate. Every business has a different starting point, a different level of knowledge, and a different goal. Training that ignores that can point you in the wrong direction.

Decide What AI Should and Should Not Touch

AI is easy to put in front of your clients, and that is the danger. When it answers their questions all day, your customers stop reaching you and start reaching AI. I get frustrated with this myself, especially with the phone systems that make you work through voice prompts and never let you reach a person.

That is a gap in how some businesses run. We are people, and we want to deal with people. Machines are great at answering a lot of questions. Now and then a customer just needs a person, and that personal touch is worth protecting.

So before any training, draw a line. Some jobs are routine and rule-based. Others are the moments where your clients need you. Train for the first kind and protect the second.

What to Do Before You Start: Four Steps

These four steps only work in this order.

1. Write down where the business stands today. Describe the business as it runs right now, and write down your goal. The goal may not be growth. It could be more time, steadier income, or fewer headaches. Every later choice depends on this one.

2. Pick the process that wears you out, and lay out every step. Choose the task you never look forward to, not because you hate it but because it is tedious. Make sure it repeats and follows clear rules. For a first one, leave out anything that needs judgment calls. Then draw it as a flow chart or write it as an outline of every step. It does not need heavy detail, but it does need to exist. I picked up this habit early as a CNC programmer, when I started leaving notes so the next person could follow my program. A process someone else can follow is a process AI can follow.

3. Decide where AI should and should not touch your work. Use the line from the last section. List the jobs AI could take on, and mark the places where your clients need you.

4. Take stock of what you and your people know. If you are a solo owner, that means you. Write down what you know, what you already use, and what nobody has ever told you. If you have employees, add what they use today and what rules, if any, anyone has set. As an owner, you may not know what you do not know, so do not assume you know everything.

Project managers sort risk into three groups, and some people add a fourth. The same idea works for your own knowledge.

• Knowns. What you know and understand, like the software you pay for.
• Known unknowns. The gaps you can see. You know something exists but do not understand it yet, like how your accounting software uses AI. These make a good shopping list for training.
• Unknown unknowns. The things you do not even know you should know about, so you cannot list them yourself. Ask someone outside your head to look at the business.
• Unknown knowns. What you know without realizing it, like the habits and rules that live only in your head.

Step two is where that last group shows up. When you write out every step of the process that wears you out, you will find things you do without thinking, such as a check you always make or a rule you always follow, that never made it onto paper. Those are the steps AI would miss, and so would a new hire.

How to Pick Training That Makes You Do the Work

I have been through a lot of training in my career, and much of it was a waste of time. Someone walks you through the software, click here, open this window, and you watch. You do not learn anything from watching. Real training takes three passes. You watch, then you do it while they watch you, then you do it on your own and they check it.

Years ago I sat through a training on a new version of Windows. All I walked away with was how to change the pointer, the little arrow, into a running horse. That was the only thing I remember from it, and the training was a waste of time. I have sat through so much training like that over the years that I barely listen anymore, because I know I will run into something and be lost, and start over anyway. Maybe I am a little jaded.

This is why step two matters. The process you laid out is what you practice on. Training stops being a demo on someone else's example and becomes work on your own business. When you compare AI training for small business owners, ask whether you will build something real, and whether someone checks it.

Goldman is right to put money into training, and I think it matters most for people building agents. Most of us are trained to get work done, not to program. Agents are easy to build now, so people build them. Without training, they do not know how AI thinks or how to protect the company and its intellectual property. An agent can have back doors, do things you do not know about, or make decisions with no decision path behind it. The person who built it will understand how it works. Nobody else will understand the logic behind it.

That risk grows when nobody sets rules. Goldman's report found that 74% of owners using AI have no formal policy for how their employees use it. AI doesn't fix a bad process, it just makes the mess move even faster.

Bring your goal, your process, and your limits to the training, because the training can teach you AI, but only you know the business it has to serve.

Keep Learning

If you want help picking and laying out your first process, read How to Use AI in a Small Business: Fix the Process Before You Buy the Software.