Made by Humans, Powered by AI: The Future of Small Business Success
A conversation with Leiha Dulawan
What does it take to survive as a small business today? With rising costs, labor shortages, and shifting consumer behaviors, many entrepreneurs find themselves navigating complexity with limited support. In this high-stakes environment, artificial intelligence is emerging, not as a flashy new trend, but as a practical, accessible tool that can help small operations stay nimble and sustainable.
The Small Business Challenge
There are 33.2 million small businesses in the US, representing over 46 percent of the US workforce. These businesses represent 44% of US GDP. And yet, only 56 percent of small businesses survive more than five years. That means there’s little margin for error early on when trying to nail the business model, identify customers, or eke out enough profit to keep the dream alive. Being a small business owner has its benefits, but also carries a significant amount of risk. It takes more than a good idea, passion, and long working hours to get it right and finding that edge can mean the difference between success and failure.
Enter AI. Now, more than ever, a wide range of AI-enabled tools are helping small businesses reduce costs, increase productivity, target buyers, and improve customer service. Something that would have seemed unimaginable just six months ago.
Meet Leiha Dulawan
Leiha Dulawan has spent years helping small businesses get unstuck. Through her firm, Laulima, she started by streamlining traditional mom-and-pop operations - improving hiring plans, financial systems, and organizational workflows.
AI is re-shaping the look of small business. Just like email some 30+ years ago, new AI management tools represent a seismic shift for small operations that once relied on paper-based systems and traditional ledger accounts. Just as email helped teams communicate faster, AI is helping organizations think faster. Every day, Leiha is helping her clients find new ways to reduce the time and costs associated with some of the more rote aspects of running a business, freeing them up to focus more of their creative energy on devising better products, growing marketshare, and improving customer experience - bellwethers of any successful small business.
AI for Disaster Relief
Curiously enough, Leiha cut her teeth on AI on the back-end of a natural disaster. It was mid-August 2023, and the town of Lahaina on the island of Maui had been devastated by wildfires that killed 100 residents, destroyed 6,500 acres of land, and caused an estimated $5.5 billion worth of damage - one of the most destructive wildfires in US history. At the time, she was living an hour’s drive east in the town of Makawao.
“When fires happen, non-profits pop up.” Everyone was trying to help, she says. “Surfers, yoga instructors, and real estate agents were all stepping up, raising money, but beyond that no one knew what to do…Someone said Leiha’s organized. She knows how to get stuff done…and so I find myself in the middle of it.”
In the throes of a crisis, chaos reigns.
“From six o'clock in the morning till ten o'clock at night, we were slammed with calls and emails…we worked nonstop for almost four months” building lists of donors, communicating with the authorities, and getting funds to where they were needed most. “It was a massive coordination effort,” she says.
To get the job done, Leiha and her fellow volunteers used Fathom to record and summarize hundreds of Zoom calls, Otter to keep minutes, and create action items for volunteers, and Descript for turning audio/video recordings into training materials. ChatGPT served the critical function of distilling large volumes of information, identifying information gaps, and assisting the team in organizing their thoughts. To pull it all together, she and her colleagues used Airtable to create an AI-powered app to keep the entire community updated and well-informed.
“There was a lot of fear and mistrust going around. Providing authentic and verifiable information was key,” she says.
Leiha was already consulting to small businesses, but she says the experience applying AI to solve a major human crisis helped her see the potential for anyone trying to make a living as a sole proprietor or small enterprise.
“They don’t have the money, time, or expertise” of a major corporation,” she says.
Most small businesses are built on a singular idea or passion. What they need are quick, easy-to-use, and affordable technology solutions to help them free up time and lower costs. Leiha is discovering how AI helps her clients move faster, capture institutional knowledge, and reduce the chaos, whether responding to a crisis or preparing to scale.
A Retailer’s Nightmare
“For instance,” she says, “I have a client - a retailer - that’s spent 30 years building a brand…a small business with one destination retail store…” Suddenly, the General Manager ups and tells the owners he’s leaving. The owners call in a panic and say they only have two weeks to download everything this guy knows.” Nothing, apparently, was written down. “Everything was in his head. It was nuts!”
Leiha found herself staring into a firestorm of a different kind. In this instance, lives weren’t on the line, but a livelihood was. Time was of the essence and capturing in a usable fashion all the information required to keep the doors open and the cash flowing meant synthesizing volumes of operating procedures, from supplier relations to inventory management, hiring procedures to accounts receivable.
She used Fathom to record dozens of interviews with the soon-to-be-absent GM. And as she had done with the Lahaina fire emergency, she used Descript to filter through, organize and create operations and training videos for the new GM and the owners. By taking photos, AI had the ability to analyze and incorporate images into the manual.
“If it wasn’t for AI, there’s no way I could have delivered. I would have suggested they start over. I’m talking ground zero!”
Enter AI: A New Business Ally
With the heavy lifting done and the former GM departed, Leiha was able to use everything she collected to create for the store its first operating manual and employee handbook. She then created hyperlinks from these documents and used Loom to generate short videos for key suppliers and new employees.
Today, the store remains open, tourism is back, and surfers the world over are still buying the brand.
“In effect, we gave the owners minute-by-minute operating guidelines covering the entire range of the business. Not only their brand, but their entire business was at stake.”
Best of all, says Leiha, with the day-to-day now operating smoothly, the owners have time to think about what comes next, building an online presence, raising brand awareness…in effect, scaling the business.”
“People,” says Leiha, “are the real risk. Employees come and go. You want the good ones to stay. With technology, you can train, develop, support, and make the employees’ lives much easier.” Best yet, she says, AI means that increasingly small business owners can do it themselves. New suites of AI tools are user-friendly and deeply intuitive.
Toward a Human-Centered Future
Self-reflecting, Leiha says: “That means less reliance on consultants. Which means I’ll need to change my business too. I’ll need to pivot around all these new AI tools in order to help my clients. That likely means more coaching, leadership development and business planning.”
The focus - in other words - can then shift to people. In her opinion, the objective is to make doing business simpler in order to free people to do what they do best.
And what’s that?
“Being creative,” she says. “I look to the day when instead of a label saying ‘Made in China’ or ‘Made in the USA’ it says ‘Made by Humans.’ I think people are going to come to value the human connection and what we deliver to a product or a service as a human. All the junk that no one likes doing goes to technology. That’s my hope, at least.”
Take-aways
The Architect: Leiha builds scalable systems for overwhelmed small businesses, especially in the 2–5 year maturity window.
Human-First AI: She applies AI not to replace but to empower, reducing tedium so people can focus on what matters.
Disaster-Tested: During Maui’s 2023 wildfires, she used AI tools to organize relief efforts with speed, trust, and transparency.
Crisis as Catalyst: When a 30-year-old retail brand risked collapse, Leiha used AI to capture and preserve core knowledge.
From Chaos to Clarity: She created handbooks, training videos, and systems that kept a legacy business alive and growing.
Reclaiming Creativity: Her endgame? A world where tech handles the grunt work, and humans return to doing what only humans can.
Last Words
“We don’t work with early-stage startups. We work with established small business owners whose passion has become their business—and it’s consuming them.”
“AI saved this project. Without it, we would’ve had to start over.”
“I'm not a consultant. I'm an implementer. I stay until the job’s done.”
“I'm here to support courage and bravery. Owning a business is one of the most emotional things people can do.”
“Eventually, I want to put my brain into AI—so small business owners everywhere can access what I know.”
“My hope is that human-made things become the most precious. That we say: made by humans, delivered by humans, crafted with flaws.”
Key Tools
Otter – for live, in-person transcription and collaborative documentation
Fathom – for Zoom call recording and summarization
Descript – for editing and organizing audio/video recordings into training materials
Loom – for recording step-by-step visual walkthroughs for team onboarding
ChatGPT - for distilling large data sets, identifying information gaps, and assisting in organizing thoughts and flagging blind spots
Airtable – as a dynamic database and app development tool for tracking volunteers, vendors, operations, and community needs
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