How small businesses can leverage AI
Every week brings another breathless case study about AI "transforming" small business, and every week I scan them looking for something worth caring about. This week's offering from MIT Technology Review's "Making AI Work" newsletter features a London-based math and philosophy tutor who uses Notion AI to manage his part-time tutoring business. His name is Sam Finnegan-Dehn, and he uses the tool to record meetings, generate summaries, draft invoices, and set goals. The article is framed as proof
Analysis
The humble private tutor, armed with nothing but a Notion subscription and a dash of entrepreneurial grit, is now the perfect canary in the AI coal mine. Sam Finnegan-Dehn isn't building a skyscraper; he's trying to keep his part-time tutoring business from collapsing under the weight of its own admin. And the fact that his solution is to let AI handle the clerical drudgery tells us more about the current state of "AI transformation" than any glossy keynote from Silicon Valley. This isn't about replacing human creativity. It's about automating the profoundly human tedium of remembering, organizing, and chasing money.
Finnegan-Dehn’s use case is refreshingly mundane, and that’s its power. He uses Notion AI as a "second memory," a secretary that syncs his scattered notes, drafts invoices, and summarizes recorded meetings. The key insight here is the tool's integration, not its brilliance. He chose it over other AI models because it lives in his notebook. This isn't a story about a revolutionary artificial mind; it's about a convenient digital assistant that has finally become reliable enough for the "good enough" tier of business operations. It doesn't teach philosophy. It handles the logistics that prevent the teacher from teaching philosophy.
The truly telling detail is his goal-setting process. He writes a "North Star" goal—say, ten clients by year-end—and asks the AI to generate the steps. This is where the promise and the peril collide. The AI can, without doubt, produce a list of generic business steps: update your website, post on social media, reach out to past contacts. But this is the equivalent of a self-help book for your business plan. It offers structure where there was none, but zero contextual wisdom. Does Finnegan-Dehn need a 10-step plan, or does he need one critical piece of advice: stop undercharging, or focus on a niche? The AI fills in the gaps with filler, not insight. It mistakes process for strategy.
And this reveals the core limitation of the "AI as secretary" narrative. The real value isn't in the AI's intelligence, but in the user's discipline to build a system around it. Finnegan-Dehn had to create a habit of logging notes in Notion. He had to design a workflow for recording and summarizing sessions. The AI didn't give him this structure; he fed the AI through his existing structure. The tool is a force multiplier for the organized, but a fancy notebook for the disorganized. The success story is ultimately a testament to the user's system, not the software's sentience.
The market, of course, will sell this differently. We are already being told AI is a "copilot for every professional." But Finnegan-Dehn’s story suggests a more accurate metaphor: AI is a very good, very literal-minded intern. It can file your notes, transcribe your calls, and draft repetitive correspondence. It cannot, and should not, be trusted with judgment, nuance, or the core creative act of pedagogy. The moment he starts using AI to "refine his teaching strategy" based on automated summaries, he’s walking a fine line. An AI summary flattens nuance; it might flag a struggling student but completely miss the reason why—the tutor's own unspoken intuition that a joke fell flat or a concept wasn't connecting.
The real business lesson here is one of triage. AI excels at the bottom of the pyramid: the administrative, the repetitive, the record-keeping. It is a powerful tool for cognitive offloading. For a solopreneur, reclaiming two hours a week from invoicing and note-synthesis is transformative. But let's be brutally honest: this is not AI "running a business." It's a slightly smarter to-do list. The danger lies in mistaking this efficiency for capability. The next step—having AI generate social media posts to grow his business—could easily result in generic, soulless content that alienates the very clients he’s trying to attract. The authenticity that likely makes him a good philosophy tutor is precisely what AI cannot replicate.
What Finnegan-Dehn’s case truly highlights is the bifurcation of AI utility. For the mass market and solo operators, AI is becoming a phenomenal utility, like cloud computing or a word processor. It's a tool that democratizes access to basic organizational competency. For enterprises, the story is different, often more about hype than substance. But for the individual? The value is real, immediate, and profoundly unsexy. It’s in the saved invoice, the synced note, the transcribed meeting you don’t have to re-watch.
So, let’s retire the grand narrative of AI as a visionary partner for every small business. Watch instead for the quiet revolution of the AI-powered secretary, the note-taker, the bookkeeper. That’s where the real, widespread productivity gains are happening, not in the boardroom, but in the home office of the tutor moonlighting from his charity job. The most impactful AI isn’t the one that dreams up a new business; it’s the one that makes running an existing, human-centered one just a little bit less exhausting. The future isn’t AI-owned businesses; it’s AI-enabled business owners who have slightly more time to do the work that actually matters. And for Sam Finnegan-Dehn, that means one less spreadsheet, and one more hour to ponder Plato. That’s a future worth automating for.
Disclaimer: The above content is generated by AI and is for reference only.