I think by now I’ve run into several examples of AI helping small organizations in ways I didn’t fully appreciate were possible. 3 of them I can pinpoint.

The first was right when ChatGPT came out.

I won’t go into too many details, but I knew the leader of a small organization, who had an important employee on the verge of leaving. A large part of the problem was simply the amount of serious, tedious paperwork she had to deal with.

GPT-3 had just become available, and it helped her enormously.

She got through the work, did it well, and, if I understood the story correctly, stayed for a few more years.

ChatGPT didn’t replace her. It made her job bearable.

I think I may have just run into this phenomenon again.

And personally, I feel it too. AI has removed so much drudgery from my own work. Without it, I’m pretty sure I would have spent a lot of that time in much worse ways.

That may turn out to be one of AI’s quieter impacts: not replacing people, but making small organizations, and the people inside them, a little more capable of carrying the load.