AI's Scale Dilemma: Who Owns Small Business Future?

Artificial intelligence presents a significant challenge for independent businesses regarding the importance of scale. In 2025, the OECD reported that 52% of large firms utilized AI, starkly contrasting with the 17.4% of small firms, indicating an unequal adoption rate.

Key conditions for AI adoption by smaller businesses include access to connectivity, data, computing resources, essential skills, and financing. Businesses require the capacity to select and effectively implement suitable AI systems.

Investment strategies are emerging to address this gap. One approach involves acquiring majority stakes in accounting firms while allowing local practices minority ownership, integrating AI tools alongside a transfer of control.

Shared ownership offers an alternative structure where members jointly own an enterprise, participate in decisions, and share in its surplus. This model allows for technological scale to be considered alongside user interests.

Howard Brodsky, founder of CCA Global Partners, advocates for shared ownership to help independent businesses achieve the scale necessary for competing in an AI-influenced economy. He emphasizes that the core issue is the ownership of competitive capabilities and the distribution of generated value.

Brodsky expresses concern that AI expertise might concentrate within well-financed organizations, limiting practical options for smaller owners. He also notes that private equity roll-ups, which consolidate businesses under larger ownership structures and integrate common AI technologies, strengthen the resulting groups against independent competitors.

Shared ownership, as Brodsky sees it, enables independent businesses to jointly support technical teams and infrastructure while retaining individual company ownership. This allows for developing expertise once and distributing it across participating businesses, reducing redundant resource assembly.

He points to driver-owned platforms like The Drivers Cooperative in New York as an example of shared technology ownership. This model brings individual operators together around essential infrastructure.

For family businesses, Brodsky believes shared ownership offers a way to organize investment, share expertise, and manage control as their needs evolve in preparation for AI. He argues that collective scale helps independent owners remain active participants in shaping their future, ensuring the value generated by shared capabilities benefits those who built the businesses.