Owners of small businesses: your co-founder will be an AI agent

For what? Because AI is not a trend – it’s a tsunami, and ignoring it could be the end for many.

The new globalization shows light

Globalization no longer requires armies of specialists or decades of accumulation of the supply chain. Today, a Lean team with tools fueled by AI can draw on global markets faster than ever.

These tools, such as real -time translation APIs and predictive analysis, allow a startup of two people to sell overnight continents, to dismantle persistent obstacles such as language differences, gaps in the knowledge of the foreign market and the difficulty of establishing cross -border confidence.

This announces the era of “micro-cultinationals”: a startup of the design studio of two people could sell products in 20 countries by taking advantage of the information on the market generated by the AI. Tasks that once required whole departments can now be carried out with the push of a button – and this is only the beginning.

Meet your co-founder: AI autonomous agent

The rise of autonomous AI agents still makes the game pass to the upper level. Imagine a 24/7 co-founder who never sleeps, tirelessly sort the suppliers, negotiate transactions, manage orders and manage logistics.

For global trade, AI agents do not only find products but also evaluate suppliers, facilitate communication, processing orders and even logistics. Consider it as having a powerful search engine as GPT chat but for B2B trade, capable of obtaining supplies throughout the digital landscape, combined with the talents of a team of professionals to manage the end-to-end process of supply and delivery. And it is not a fantasy, the own ACCIO agent of Alibaba already automates 70% of the traditionally manual workflows for B2B buyers around the world, compressing fragmented processes, in particular the ideation of products, prototyping, compliance controls and supplier supply in a transparent cycle and fueled in AI.

AI is real. It’s here.

Why the B2B industry of 30 billions of dollars conducts IA costs

While consumers still warm up at AI, B2B decision -makers are already underway for three reasons:

1. scale: Large scale of production and consumption invokes economies of scale, especially in a B2B industry of 30 billions of dollars. For example, a medium -sized manufacturer can use AI to reduce the costs of the 15% supply chain thanks to predictive maintenance, which is revolutionary for a company when millions of dollars are at stake.

2. SPEED: For many small businesses, AI can radically shrink a request for a week’s proposal process by automating suppliers’ comparisons and the drafting of contracts.

3. Research transformation: B2B buyers will expect that platforms in the future include extremely specific requests such as “show me 3D printed parts for aerospace that meet the specifications of the FAA” and produce results that bring them directly to the page of a good supplier. The future of B2B research no longer concerns the optimization of search engines (SEO), but on the generative optimization of the AI ​​engine.

Small businesses: start small but start now

Yes, it can be intimidating for a small business owner to adopt AI, but you have no choice, you adapt or risk disappearing in the dust of the competitors who do it.

The good news is that you do not need a complete incorporation of AI overnight. Start small – maybe implement a customer service chatbot tool or AI data analysis – and evolve from there.

The future belongs to those who treat AI not as a luxury, but as an essential infrastructure.

The opinions expressed in the Fortune.com comments are only the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

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