Former UK PM, Now Goldman Adviser, Says Small Businesses Can’t Ignore AI

Goldman Sachs wants U.K. small businesses to embrace artificial intelligence.

The banking giant held a gathering last week in Birmingham to instruct small businesses on the dangers of ignoring AI, Bloomberg News reported Saturday (March 28).

“We have a situation where global behemoths are swallowing up small businesses or pushing them out,” said former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak , who was named senior adviser to Goldman last year. “When it comes to AI, adoption is everything.”

According to the report, leaders from 300 companies took part in Goldman’s 10,000 Small Businesses UK summit, offered for small businesses in association with the University of Oxford’s Said Business School .

Bloomberg noted that Sunak had promoted the use of AI while in office, pledging upwards of £100 million to help regulators and universities deal with challenges related to the technology, and hosting the first world summit on AI safety.

“I see it in my own constituency up in North Yorkshire,” he said. “I was recently talking to a dairy farmer who was using AI together with wearables , so he could spot things like mastitis in his cattle before it became an issue for his milk.”

The Bloomberg report noted a survey from Goldman taken in March of 400 graduates of Goldman’s program, which found that 98% of these small businesses were already using AI.

PYMNTS has written about the way that AI is allowing small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) to realize some of the same advantages as their larger counterparts.

“The unlock is going to be tremendous. AI is going to enable people to explore dreams and passions they never thought of before. … I think it’s a huge, huge equalizer,” René Lacerte, CEO and founder of BILL, told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster during an interview last year. “We’ll [soon] be talking about the Fortune 500 wanting the agility of the Fortune 5 million .”

More recently, PYMNTS looked into the need for SMBs to embrace newer technologies , as some of these businesses find themselves hindered by legacy processes.

For example, the PYMNTS Intelligence/Mastercard report “Ready for Change: Why Nearly Half of SMBs Want to Ditch Cash and Checks,” shows that 52% of the payments made by Gen Z-owned SMBs are in cash, in spite of the availability of digital tools.

“Individually, these legacy frictions may seem trivial. Collectively, they create a hierarchy of convenience,” PYMNTS wrote.

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