The Two Futures of AI That Matter to Your SME: Impact and Enhanced Thinking.
When most SME leaders think about AI, they do so with an “efficiency” mindset. They think: How much can it save me in salaries or operational hours?
But that’s just the starting line. It’s looking at AI through the rearview mirror.
The true impact of Artificial Intelligence splits into two approaches that go far beyond cutting costs, and which define whether your business will be a leader or a follower. These are two key focuses: Social Impact and Enhanced Thinking.
1. Social Impact (AI for Solving Major Challenges)
The first approach uses AI to address deep-seated problems in society or your sector, which not only improves your brand image but connects you with a more conscious customer base.
For example, I think of the work by innovators like Mercedes Bidart (Quipu), who use AI to create opportunities for people abandoned by the traditional financial system. This is a clear case of how technology can generate inclusion, not just profit.
For your SME in Mallorca, you don’t need to solve world hunger. The social impact of AI can be: How does my team use AI to reduce the environmental footprint of our processes? or How do we use data to make our product accessible to people with certain disabilities? AI as an engine for doing good, in addition to doing business.
2. Enhanced Thinking (Potentiating Your Judgment)
This is the most crucial focus for leadership. It consists of using AI to help us think, not to think for us.
In the TEDAI Vienna debates, the central idea was: AI should be a tool to supercharge your brain. It’s not about using AI to do things faster, but to make decisions significantly better.
The Strategic Decision Example:
Imagine you must decide whether to invest in a new product line.
- Traditional Process: You spend weeks analyzing reports, making projections, and looking for trends. Your decision is based on what your limited time allows you to process.
- With Enhanced Thinking: AI processes and correlates thousands of market trends in hours, delivers a list of possible risks you would never have considered, and presents crucial questions you haven’t addressed. Your ingenuity is dedicated to evaluating these new scenarios, not data entry.
This changes everything. AI is not just an efficiency tool; it is a powerful engine for taking your critical and strategic thinking to the next level. If you only use AI to save costs, your business is losing the strategic opportunity.
The Strategic Package is the Key
My job as a consultant is to help you integrate these two approaches. My Fixed-Price Strategic Package is designed to look beyond cost savings. In the Strategy and Results phase, we define objectives that:
- Impact your margin (Savings and Efficiency).
- Enhance your team’s capacity to think and decide (Enhanced Thinking).
- Connect with a real purpose (Impact and Ethics).
Therefore, the question for your business is not just: “How can we save money?”. The strategic question is: “How do we use AI to think better and, at the same time, make a real impact that gives us a sustainable competitive advantage?”