The size paradox: when a small business owner gets ahead of a multinational by putting AI to work

I work at a law firm and deal every day with banks, law firms large and small, architects, builders, business owners… One thing strikes me in those dealings: the smaller the organisation, the more freedom the person in charge tends to have to introduce artificial intelligence.

You see the paradox when, for example, a local architect working on private projects has more modern internal processes, thanks to AI, than a bank.

This is the image that captures my impression: the employee at a big company is pleased because they were given Copilot in Outlook last week, while the independent professional has built a complete system for automating tasks and managing the business because they know their business, their needs and their risks, and can make decisions and adjustments in real time.

Eurostat's figures show greater use of AI among large companies. 1 But not every small or medium-sized business needs to adopt it, can do so or wants to. A bar may have other priorities. The opportunity lies with those that do take the step: they can move faster, transform the way they work and use that advantage to grow.

My explanation is the closeness between the person who sees the problem and the person who makes the decision.

The owner of a small business knows where work gets held up. They know which information they keep having to ask for, which task takes up a whole morning and which procedure means doing something all over again. If they find a better way to handle it, they can try it. And if it works, make it part of the business.

Think of a practice that prepares quotes from scattered emails, notes and documents. The person running it could use AI to organise that information, prepare a draft for review and get the follow-up tasks ready. They can start with one part, see where it goes wrong and adjust. The person who has to work with the result is right there.

Now take that proposal into a large organisation. The employee spots the problem and explains it to their manager. The manager consults another department. Someone needs to assess the integration, review the supplier and work out who authorises it and who is accountable if something goes wrong. The idea starts making its way up the hierarchy. At every level, someone has to take on a risk.

The independent professional may already be using the second version while the proposal at the big company is still looking for someone to approve it.

In banking, there are good reasons for that slower pace. Supervision, rules such as DORA and the need to protect services that many people depend on require changes and their risks to be kept under control. 2 Every adjustment needs preparation and may affect interconnected systems. That care costs time and money. It is part of the price of being big, and that is precisely where room opens up for those who can move sooner.

Introducing a change for ten clients is very different from rolling it out to a hundred thousand. In the first case, it is easier to keep track of what happens, spot a problem and fix it. In the second, much wider consequences have to be anticipated before anything is touched. The distance between making a decision and seeing the result changes completely.

For the small business, of course, agility without control can be costly. Client data and professional confidentiality need care, however quickly the tool lets you move.

But with that control in place, the opportunity is enormous. A small or medium-sized business can build one improvement on another: prepare quotes sooner, organise documents, reduce repetitive tasks and handle more work with its existing team. Each improvement frees up time for the next. And that time can also go into sales, better service or a new line of business.

Businesses built with AI from the outset can go further still. They can design from the start how an assignment comes in, how the work is prepared, who reviews it and how it reaches the client. They begin with the freedom to organise the business around those possibilities, without having to renegotiate every step with an inherited structure.

That is the opportunity to take on the big dinosaurs: compete with lower coordination costs and turn a good idea into real work before they do. Size becomes a less comfortable advantage when a smaller competitor learns and changes faster.

The lesson for the big company is to bring decision-making closer to the problem. Give the people who know the work room to act. Set clear boundaries and let improvements move forward within them.

While a multinational decides who can authorise the next step, a small business may already be taking it. And the next. Repeated every day, that gap can end up changing who competes with whom.