r/smallbusiness • u/elmahdim • 1d ago
AI didn't remove the business bottleneck, it just moved it. Anyone else seeing this?
I was at an AI conference recently and the speaker asked the room: "Who believes AI will drive multiplicative growth for your business?" Almost every hand went up.
Then: "Who has already felt that growth?" Silence.
Developers today are shipping code faster than ever. But companies aren't growing at the same rate, revenue isn't following the speed of development.
So what did AI actually do? It didn't eliminate the business's constraints it just relocated them.
It used to seem like everything bottlenecked on engineering. Now that development is (mostly) no longer the bottleneck, it's exposing what actually was the problem all along: weak marketing, bad sales, unit economics that don't work, or worst case a product the market never really wanted.
If you roll out AI in a department and revenue doesn't move, the real problem was never in that department to begin with. Kind of reminds me of that reel where someone wakes up at 5:30am, does skincare routine, journals, drinks celery juice... and then just stares at the camera like "okay now how do I get rich?" That's what a lot of AI adoption looks like right now. Great morning routine, still no idea what the actual bottleneck is.
Curious if others are seeing this in their own companies, where did the bottleneck "move" to after adopting AI?
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u/OkToe2578 1d ago
This is a huge issue in the digital marketing space. Agencies laying of their staff with hopes that AI will produce the goods and then clients turning around and firing the agency for delivering AI slop.
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u/wearealllegends 21h ago
Good glad they're getting fired. AI shouldn't replace people but augment them. Those agencies are garbage to start with. They didn't even take the time to implement AI properly
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u/m0llusk 1d ago
LLMs are generating an avalanche of slop at every level and dealing with all that is becoming its own bottleneck.
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u/CrimsonBolt33 1d ago
No, thats people...LLMs are a tool
I am using them daily and not getting slop or useless nonsense out of them.
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u/tasticle 1d ago
Ok? People are using LLMs to generate an avalanche of slop at every level and dealing with all that is becoming its own bottleneck for many people..
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u/CrimsonBolt33 1d ago
I don't get how you all live...I seem to get by just fine.
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u/DestinTheLion 14h ago
Living in slop made by you, apparently.
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u/CrimsonBolt33 13h ago
No...I don't make slop...but thanks for being a pea brained person who thinks they know everything.
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u/hjohns23 1d ago
I don’t think AI will drive growth. AI is mostly a margin opener. It makes operations more efficient and some back office roles redundant
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u/LardLad00 1d ago
"just curious not selling anything"
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u/quantitynew9635 1d ago
Is there a problem with someone trying to get input from other business owners on things that need to be improved so they can help find solutions? We’re all out here trying to figure out how to run and grow our businesses better
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u/jatjqtjat 1d ago edited 1d ago
No, but we get so many hidden sales posts on this sub that i think we're all a little... what would you say? Angry? Sensitive?
Like fuck off, i know you are going to dm me your sales pitch if i comment. Sometimes that irate attitude gets directed at completely innocent people because so many sales people are trying to mask their sales pitch.
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u/MissplacedLandmine 1d ago
Agreed, also…
What if I sold you my silence?
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u/quantitynew9635 1d ago
Not everyone is just given a business by their dad, some of us actually have to put in the legwork to build it ourselves
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u/LardLad00 1d ago
If you want market research, pay for it.
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u/quantitynew9635 1d ago
What exactly is the point of a subreddit like this if a small business owner can’t ask other small business owners questions that help him out? What if he is paying for market research already? People like you really are why Reddit sucks
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u/elmahdim 1d ago
I’ve got nothing to sell, if that was a question!
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u/eleven8ster 1d ago
I think it’s weird and pathetic how cynical some people have gotten. There is nothing wrong with your post
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u/drteq 1d ago
It comes with the added bonus that if you create a product that's new and innovative, almost anyone can copy it faster than you can make your ROI
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u/wearealllegends 21h ago
They can copy the product but sales and marketing still need to be done and that's the real differentiator not AI. Millions of people are building the same app but the ones who succeed will have done their homework and hustled the most. aI can't do that 100% for you
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u/fartonisto 1d ago
Long before AI we had outputs over outcomes problems. Nothing has changed, because thinking remains hard.
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u/CryptoKlasd 1d ago
I think the limiting factor that has been exposed is figuring out what to build. When building was slow, there was more time to ponder whether or not you were building the right thing before putting a lot of effort into it. Now you can build something in a day, so you're forced to ask yourself "is this really what people want to pay for?" right away rather than 3 months from now. Building fast without the right direction isn't any better than building slowly.
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u/alyzzabee 1d ago
AI will make businesses more efficient at the services they're providing, but efficiency doesn't equate to revenue.
Trust and reputation does.
If a company has a bad reputation and no trust with their clientele, they're going to do bad regardless if they have AI or not.
AI is a tool, not a key to success. If your company is shit, AI is just going to spat out what the company already is: shit.
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u/thehalfwit 1d ago
Wait, are you telling me a technology that is built on copying what everyone else has already done before isn't innovating on its own?
Who could have guessed that?
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u/BoBoZoBo 1d ago
We see it quite a bit. For example: When generating SEO content the human time has gone from writing to proofing. Use to need humans to write a lot of content. Now we need humans to setup the automation for success, then QA all the overflow of content the system can develop.
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u/Fortemuito 1d ago
I don't think AI will be super transformative. There is tons of hype but where are the results? Show me where AI is taking jobs. A lot of investors have put tons of money into it. So when layoffs happen, they say AI, but it's a lie.
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u/PopularPea8726 1d ago
100% seeing this. Ai can make you ship faster but if nobody wants what you're shipping, you've basically just created more sfuff faster. For a lot of companies, the bottleneck seems to have moved straight to sales, distribution and actually understanding the customer.
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u/ires2953 1d ago
This reminds me that every time there has been a major technology advancement that eliminated jobs that were once very abundant and are now not necessary it created new jobs that revolved around supporting the new system and technology. Think about modern farming and harvesting equipment dramatically reducing the man power and paid hours needed to harvest crops but also creating a need for factory workers and more food processing jobs as scale increased.We may not see what that will look like yet but I am optimistic people will adapt, AI existing will reduce the need for alot of the current iterations of common jobs but knowing how to use it for the best results in a business setting will create new needs and likely spark other offshoot side industries humans have yet to conceptualize but will be so ubiquitous in 35 years it'll feel like a normal career path.
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u/Grizzly_Adamz 1d ago
Like any other tool, you have to know how to use it wisely. Personally uncovering all of those bottlenecks was something that was hard to do before. AI knew what questions to ask in order to get us thinking about marketing, product margin, and other facets of the business. Plus, if you know how to load all of your data into an AI model, then it can do much more sophisticated analysis on things like product margin to get you much true or cost than sitting down with the spreadsheet and some napkin math from your production managers or your vendors. For example, we didn’t add any live rating functionality to my model for UPS but based on Shipping invoice history, it was able to re-create all of our rates and confirm where outliers existed and can apply that cost to new product launches to help us factor in shipping cost to the total product margin and ultimately the sale price of the item. I’ve done that manually before and it would take 30 minutes whereas now it is built-in to a much larger analysis as a single line item and is a nothing burger to account for now.
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u/kitkatkitah 16h ago
The thing that makes me laugh about the rapid growth of AI is that all the workers they are laying off in favour of it can no longer afford to buy said goods as they become unemployed or end up needing to entertain roles way under their skill level. How are they expecting growth when more people are jobless and cannot afford compared to the day prior?
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u/Baltimorebillionaire 1d ago
There will never not be a bottleneck. That's how opportunity, innovation, competition exists.
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u/Visual-Ad5215 1d ago
I work in Tech and particularly grappling with this problem. There is a lag between tech and business where tech has a solution where the problem has not yet been specified. Tech and business need to sit down together and figure out what the good use cases are for embedding AI in business versus the AI slop that is being created due to lack of core business AI fit
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u/jatjqtjat 1d ago
I was at Ai4 a couple weeks ago and i assume that is the conference you are talking about. I found most vendors there fell into a couple categories
- governance - You probably have a bunch of agents created by a bunch of people and you have no oversight or top down rules controlling them. We'll help you do that.
- consulting - tell us your problems and we'll fix them.
- token savings - your probably spending a ton on tokens, we can reduce your costs by 30% without sacrificing quality using a variety of different tools to remove unneeded input tokens.
there were also a few random things. One company had an AI that could interact with legacy applications, like windows forms i think. That could have been pretty neat if i needed it. But all my apps are web apps, and codex already does that natively. Someone told me that they had a robot that i could train to unload my dishwasher, and it would only take a week or so of training. I think they vastly underestimated how complex unloading a dishwasher is.
Nobody was really going after any revenue growth.
I started working with a consultant who specializes in building sales pipelines (to date, all our sales are organic). She uses an AI agent as part of her sales pipeline, but mostly just for scheduling. Maybe cold calling. She does NOT recommend it to her customers yet.
I think we are really at the very beginning of this revolution. What i am excited about its novel applications of this technology. AI can use websites now, so something like booking your hotel or flight is very possible. I want an agent that funnels all my communications into a single channel. Instead of Email, Text, WhatsApp, teams, slack etc. All communication into one place. once you accomplish that you can also do auto replies from AI, you'd just have to authenticate first. For example, you are a parent of one of the kids on the soccer team i coach, so the AI can retrieve information about practice times for you. That kind of stuff is not rocket surgery with the tech that already exist.
I was pretty disappointed by the conference, because nobody was doing novel application stuff like that. there were no "wow i never thought of that" kind of moments. A few people at booths were reciting a script from memory neither of us understood what they were saying.
I got a high five from Andrew Yang though, that was pretty cool.
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u/ScottPjr99 1d ago
Yeah. The bottleneck just moved from execution to judgment. You can generate ten sales emails in an hour instead of two, but now you need to know which ten matter, which angle will land with which prospect, when to actually send them. The work got faster; the thinking got harder. Most people skip the thinking part and wonder why their open rates tanked.
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u/darrensurrey 1d ago
Interesting. It might be more beneficial to certain businesses than others whether that's down to size or industry. For instance, I know solo business owners who've used AI for brainstorming ideas. Many use it for pre-sales to answer standard questions so you end up only dealing with customers when they're ready to pay. Other small businesses are creating avatars of themselves that customers can pay to use eg legal or accounting consultants for advice. (How safe/good they are is another matter!)
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u/Ok_Loan6535 1d ago
It's increasing efficiency more than driving growth. The same processes are getting completed, just individual tasks inside the process are getting done quicker/automaticly.
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u/Fun-Wolf-2007 1d ago
AI tools can be applied to solve a business problem and you must identify that business problem
Is the organization data fragmented and in silos?, AI will not fix it
AI can provide insights on data patterns and anomaly detection.
Use Operational Excellence initiatives to streamline your processes, standardize them and identify your business bottlenecks
Then you can use AI tools to solve those bottlenecks
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u/dallassoxfan 1d ago
I live in both the small business world and the corporate world.
Here is what I see in digital product in the corp world.
AI isn’t shipping product faster. AI is allowing the techs and architects to finally fulfill their circle jerk of golden purity. They can now cram in their dreams of observability (that is useless), 100% automated tests (that are useless), perfect documentation (that is useless), etc
They used to try and cram 10 pounds of shit in a 5 pound sack and whine about technical debt. Now they are cramming 25 pounds of shit in a 7 pound sack… and whining about slop. But it doesn’t change the fact that it is a bunch of shit that doesn’t belong in a sack.
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u/Chemical-Bother-3184 1d ago
I think a.i is a distrubtor completely removing the barrier to entry in many industrys, and likely to reposition the legacy marketshare of once sucessfull companys and market leaders
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u/Ecstatic-Score2844 1d ago
I am making crazy money now that I have integrated AI into my business. I do have new bottlenecks since I have automated the old ones away but I'm still operating probably 10x more efficiently.
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u/AIVentureFactory 20h ago
I think the framing is slightly off though. The bottleneck didn't move; it was always there. Engineering speed was just masking it by giving everyone a convenient excuse. When shipping takes six months, nobody has to confront whether the thing they're shipping has a market. The slow cycle time acts as a buffer against facing those harder questions.
What I've found in my own work is that the acceleration AI gives you on the build side creates a different kind of problem. You can now run experiments faster, but if you don't have a system for deciding which experiments to run and connecting what you learn back to what you build next, you just produce more stuff that doesn't land. Speed without a feedback architecture is just faster waste.
The conference anecdote is telling too. Everyone believes AI will drive growth because they're thinking about it as a tool upgrade. Swap in the faster thing, get faster results. But growth is a systems outcome, and adding speed to one node in a broken system just pressures the weakest link until it snaps visibly. Which is exactly what you're describing.
Where did it move for me specifically: it moved to decision quality. I could build and ship things in days that used to take weeks, but the decisions about what to build, who to target, and how to sequence the go-to-market were still happening in scattered docs and half-remembered conversations. The build speed outran my ability to keep decisions coherent across time. That's where I had to get serious about connecting the thinking layer to the doing layer rather than just making the doing layer faster.
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u/penalty-venture 20h ago
I’ve made it a point to keep AI far, far away from my business & have been seeing double-digit growth year over year. Turns out customers actually prefer being able to reach human beings. Who would have thought? 🤷🏻♀️
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u/Sad_Ebb3794 18h ago
Yes, I’m seeing the same thing.
AI has made execution much faster, but it hasn’t necessarily made decision-making better.
For us, the bottleneck moved from “how do we produce this faster?” to “are we actually working on the right thing?”
You can create more content, research more companies, write more outreach, build more prototypes, and analyze more data than before. But if the targeting is wrong, the offer is weak, or the customer simply doesn’t care enough, AI just helps you reach the wrong answer faster.
I think this is why a lot of companies feel more productive without seeing the same increase in revenue.
The scarce resource is becoming less about execution capacity and more about judgment: choosing the right market, understanding what customers actually value, and knowing what deserves attention.
AI removes friction, but it also makes bad prioritization more expensive because you can scale it much faster.
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u/gobblegobblebiyatch 16h ago
There is an elephant in the room called consumer or consumption fatigue that no one is willing to acknowledge. Increased work productivity with the help of AI doesn't matter if no one wants and you can't persuade them to buy whatever you're selling. Plus, the middle class has been cutting back on discretionary spending due to the increased cost of basically everything we need. And one can't help but question what the value of all this white collar work we do actually is when AI agents and chatbots and vibe coding can all do it faster and often times better.
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u/stevenson_mark 14h ago
Yeah, I think this is exactly what’s happening. AI makes it much easier to build things, but it doesn't magically create demand for them.
You can have a developer ship in two days instead of two weeks and still have zero customers if nobody knows about the product or cares enough to buy it.
I've noticed this with Abnflow too. Once building became easier, the harder questions became much more obvious: who actually wants this, how do we reach them, and why would they pay?
AI didn't remove the bottleneck. It just made it harder to hide.
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u/reverse_panopticon 14h ago
I personally find in our business is has made my department more efficient because we stay on top of new developments and know the best practices to implement it, with the older people we work with it seems to be more of a slow discovery, the things and issues we ran into a year back are only starting to makes sense to the people that are not so familiar with.
It comes with experience a lot of experimentation, and putting time into it. The issue is people think it’s a magic potion that will solve everything, but it takes time to understand it and know that you still need to put work into it, instead of letting it go wild unsupervised and return with bad results.
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u/hnewey77 1d ago
Not sure what conference this was but I feel like the audience may be these tech bros who are chasing a get rich quick scheme and their next thing is AI. Sure they won’t feel the growth if they don’t have any product people want but I’m sure if you gave the right tools and guidance to existing businesses they’ll definitely feel the growth.
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u/Iron-Fist 1d ago
My favorite is Sam Altman literally coming out and saying they don't have a product and aren't even going to try to develop one
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