How small businesses can lean into AI’s growth moment
AI is driving growth for small businesses and changing work at the task level. It's leveling the playing field and opening opportunities to accelerate faster than before, but any growth moment comes with challenges. AI is transforming work, but it's not eliminating the need to manage it. To really scale with success, small businesses need to navigate increased compliance and workforce complexities.
The key to sustained AI-driven growth is to put the foundational elements in place first and avoid "quick-and-easy" fixes in the form of plug-and-play solutions that won't cut it in the long term. Only by establishing a solid business foundation can you clear the runway for success.
According to ADP's Spring 2026 Market Pulse Survey of 2,200 HR decision makers, smaller companies are more likely to believe that the use of AI can help increase productivity and help reduce costs. However, there remains an adoption gap between small and large companies. As company size increases, so does the likelihood of using AI for payroll and HR-related tasks.
Set your small business up to scale
To leverage AI to scale, small businesses need to first consider whether their operational foundation can support the growth that's possible. Establishing clear systems early can keep you better organized as you grow and help prevent you from potentially scaling costly errors. Set up payroll early to help keep taxes accurate, speed up future hiring, and reduce compliance risk from the start. It's important to formalize your policies too, to help set clear expectations from the outset and to have a resource for employees as you expand your team. This foundation will help power future automation and growth.
Leverage AI to grow your small business
These five common operations demonstrate how AI can be used to support a small business's long-term goals.
Hire quickly to support growth
Finding qualified candidates can be one of the most difficult aspects of growing your small business. When demand increases, the need for additional headcount can often become urgent. Leveraging AI can help make recruiting faster and more efficient. However, it's imperative that these processes have human oversight to ensure regulatory compliance.
Get people up and running
The predictability of employee onboarding workflows makes the process a top candidate for AI. AI can help automate routine tasks and checklist items, while alerting managers and HR practitioners if a new hire misses a check-in or encounters a problem. The key to AI-driven onboarding is finding a hybrid solution that integrates automation and tasks that must be done by humans. Personalization is key too, to ensure onboarding is tailored to the roles each new employee takes with custom skills-based learning paths.
Stay on top of changing regulations
Compliance requirements for AI systems will get more complex, posing potential compliance risk for small businesses. Small businesses are navigating multijurisdictional AI rules, expanding paid and protected leave laws, employee classification rules, and joint-employer regulations, among others as regulatory fragmentation increases. To prepare for this evolving AI regulatory landscape, companies should establish clear governance and ownership of AI workflows, approval processes, and escalation paths while also implementing access controls, data protections, and real-time guardrail monitoring.
Create a great employee experience
AI-assisted HR support services can apply data and expertise to help answer employee questions and resolve problems faster. However, using AI to enhance employee engagement requires balancing automation of routine tasks with person-to-person contact for relationship building and individualized guidance. To be successful, AI tools for skills and culture development must be able to surface internal knowledge and resources in real time, collect and analyze employee feedback just as quickly, and identify moments that need human support.
Spot workforce needs and opportunities
As AI transforms work at the task level, job descriptions are evolving into personalized skills inventories that support proactive workforce planning intended to make companies as agile as possible. By spotting skills gaps, small businesses can better understand staffing needs based on projects. What's required are systems that embed AI guardrails into these workflows to support compliance complexities.
Rely on trusted expertise to build a strong business foundation
The most effective way for small businesses to grow and successfully scale their core business operations is by working with partners they know and trust. AI alone can't successfully scale your business. Build a circle of trusted advisors and rely on them for practical advice when it's time to graduate different systems and processes to support greater demand. Managing a workforce is still a deeply nuanced, human function, no matter how quickly you scale.
This story was produced by ADP and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.
Copyright 2026 Stacker Media, LLC
This story was originally published June 22, 2026 at 7:30 AM.