The Wall Street Journal: AI Tools Accelerate Downward, Small Businesses Rush to Enter

The Wall Street Journal reports that artificial intelligence is crossing the threshold of enterprise scale and accelerating its penetration into ordinary American merchants. A survey by Citizens Financial in March this year showed that over 50% of small businesses plan to use AI tools to enhance productivity this quarter. Among businesses with 20 to 99 people, this proportion rises to 84%; among enterprises with more than 100 employees, 91% said they are actively deploying. Mark Valentino, head of Citizens Commercial Bank, described this pace as "the speed at which tools are adopted is just so fast".

New York bakery By the Way Bakery is a typical microcosm of this trend. Founder Helene Godin, previously a practicing intellectual property lawyer for 22 years, retired in 2010 to start a business. Now she has four retail stores and a wholesale factory, with 85 employees, annual sales of about 8 million US dollars, producing more than 500 layer cakes daily, and selling about 300,000 mini bundt cakes annually.

However, management disorder comes with scale expansion. Operations Manager Elizabeth Turbé has to print a baking schedule in Excel once or twice a week and also prepares boxes of rulers for the bakers to track line by line which process should be done that day. Whenever there is a change in orders, she has to manually update the entire production table. Behind a chocolate cake, it involves batter ingredients, moisturizing syrup, frosting, and decoration, while also coordinating the oven schedule for scones, brownies, and custom wedding cakes. The complexity is beyond imagination.

The turning point came from the consulting firm Streamliners. The company developed an AI agent for By the Way, directly extracting data from the electronic spreadsheets accumulated by the bakery over the years, and constructing a customized resource planning system. Now, when an order for 1,200 cakes comes in, the system automatically calculates how many eggs and powdered sugar are needed, and employees can get the required material information by scanning barcodes. Turbé said that employees' time can now be used to "really bake, instead of staring at paper to understand what they should do".

Cost is where this is truly disruptive. Large food companies spend millions of dollars building similar enterprise resource planning systems, while By the Way's entire AI solution only requires a subscription fee of a few hundred dollars per month, plus a few dollars per month for AI computing. Tanner De Jonge, Chief Technology Officer of Streamliners, summarized this in one sentence: "The larger the scale, the more important the data." This logic is especially true for small businesses that are in the expansion phase.

Godin's goal is to have products in 1,500 stores by the end of 2026, with annual production possibly doubling or tripling. She is also promoting automation in other areas - introducing a carton assembly machine in 2025, and launching a donut dipping machine six months ago, which increased the efficiency of this process by 90%. However, the boundaries of technology are also clear. De Jonge frankly stated that AI can still have "illusions" and must set up manual guardrails, "otherwise it might decide to make 20,000 cakes on Monday". The meticulous operations manager Victor in the bakery is still an indispensable cornerstone behind the system.

The signal significance of this trend for investors is not to be ignored. The market space for AI applications is far more than just top technology companies and Fortune 500 companies. The penetration rate among small businesses is rapidly increasing, becoming a new incremental narrative for the commercialization and implementation of AI.