Last year, I predicted that 2024 would be the year small business case studies defined AI’s path forward as an invaluable support tool. The technology did not disappoint, and small businesses of all stripes benefited from revenue forecasting, enhanced grammar suggestions, automated inventory management, and more.

Now, looking ahead to 2025, I expect AI to dive into more mission-critical tasks, such as data privacy and security, and laying a foundation from which small businesses can scale while smoothing any bumps in the road.

Here’s more on where the industry is headed in 2025 and how AI will rise to these new challenges:

Increased data privacy and security threats met with new, AI-enabled solutions

It’s frightening to think how much easier, faster, and better scams have become just in the past year. Generative AI has enabled bad actors to draft and launch convincing, personalized phishing attacks with little effort and on a mass scale. Likewise, by leveraging advanced AI and ML tools, a savvy scammer can now create deep fakes of innocent people whose only crime was posting a handful of personal photos and 30 seconds of their voice online. Those deep fakes can then be weaponized to fleece friends, family, or even employers out of money or sensitive information.

The coming years will see a proliferation of privacy and security tools imbued with AI capabilities to ensure greater protection from attacks. These solutions, be they new apps from challengers or improved solutions from legacy vendors, will use AI advancements around computing power, language models, and threat/anomaly detection to automatically identify and thwart malicious cyber attacks and phishing schemes.

While these solutions may appear geared for enterprise businesses, SMBs remain a soft target for bad actors whose successful attacks endanger not only the business and its employees, but also any and all customers. By installing the proper protections, small businesses can rest assured they’re on a growth path without too many unwanted detours.

AI-infused BI for personalized data recommendations and more comprehensive insights

Historically, SMBs have relied on broad analytic tools to gather relatively simple insights into their businesses. Now, as businesses enter the AI era, advancements to the technology, growing adoption, and expanding use cases have democratized access to a deeply powerful analytics tool for even the smallest organizations.

As vendors compete to embed their Business Intelligence solutions with the latest AI functionality, SMBs stand to gain a lot. Expect more affordable BI solutions to enter the market that, through deep integrations with AI, enable more personalization, better data and insights, easier UIs, more automation, and, importantly, actionable recommendations, summaries, and generative solutions based on data sets of any size.

These enhancements won’t require additional apps or an expensive technology overhaul, either. Much like more routine functionality, you can expect to see robust BI capabilities baked into standard software as table stakes, moving forward, saving small businesses numerous headaches.

AI will give SMBs exponentially more time to think big

In the near term, AI is primed to relieve 10% of every department and role’s repetitive, redundant tasks—and do that work 10 times better.

But it won’t end there. In 2025, small business owners and founders, who are often mired in busy work across several departments and roles—sometimes all of them—stand to gain efficiencies across multiple responsibilities, making them exponentially more productive than, say, an accountant or sales rep at a large organization. This leaves more time for small businesses to strategize around growth, innovation, and market penetration—all forward-thinking, revenue-generating areas where AI can now help as well.

Consider the potential time saved on manual data entry that’s now available for reviewing and pursuing growth opportunities—new markets to enter, product diversification, pricing models, etc.—suggested by AI based on accurate and comprehensive data analyzed in a BI system. As this sequence is repeated, a company’s AI will learn from real-time results and start refining its suggestions towards an organic growth model tailored to each SMB.

AI experiences some growing pains

Despite some exciting developments, AI in 2025 is not without its potential perils. Bias continues to be an issue for training LLMs, particularly when it comes to regional and cultural specifics. While privacy and security risks can be mitigated by AI, there’s no telling how low some bad actors can sink and what new methods they may deduce. Plus, legislation governing AI use remains in nascent stages in most of the world—as if some countries are too scared to get something on paper that may be outdated almost immediately.

Still, if 2024 was the year AI earned a seat at the SMB table, 2025 will be the time AI does the cooking and the dishes, too, while small business owners plan the next menu.

This article, “Predictions for Small Businesses and AI in 2025” was first published on Small Business Trends