An AI Forward Business Is a Better Small Business. It's Time We Certified It.

On June 3, 2026, Perplexity and the U.S. Small Business Administration stood on the same stage in Washington, D.C. and launched the Main Street AI Accelerator: $25 million in Perplexity Computer credits for 100,000 American small businesses.

Every recipient of an SBA 7(a), 504, or microloan this year is eligible.

Dmitry Shevelenko, Perplexity's Chief Business Officer, opened by connecting the moment to America's 250th birthday next month: “We have spent today talking about what the founders built with the tools of their time. We wanted to mark America's 250th by backing the next generation of builders.”

It was a striking image. A frontier AI company and the federal agency that finances Main Street, aligned on the same thesis: intelligence is now a resource that can be distributed alongside capital.

But as I sat in that room listening to panels of operators, policymakers, and platform leaders describe what AI is already doing for small businesses, a bigger idea kept forming. Not just that AI helps small businesses. That an AI Forward business is, measurably, a better small business. And if that's true, it changes how we should think about risk, lending, and public support for entrepreneurship.

The Main Street AI Summit wasn't short on numbers.

Intuit surveyed 35,000 small businesses and found that 77% are now using AI, up from 35% in 2024. Within the QuickBooks ecosystem, roughly 3 million users engage with AI tools regularly, with an 80% repeat rate. Those businesses are getting paid five days faster and are 10% more likely to be paid in full.

Stripe reported that the average time for a new business to reach $5 million in annual recurring revenue has compressed from 41 months to 13. More businesses are being created every quarter than ever before, with a growing share of solo founders. The painful early period where founders spend before they earn is getting shorter.

Shopify shared that new merchant growth hit its highest point ever in January 2026, and that the time to first sale has improved sevenfold in two years. Their most striking observation: the smallest, least resourced businesses are adopting AI the most aggressively, inverting the historical pattern where large companies move first and small firms lag behind.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce puts the number at 58% of small businesses using generative AI, up from 23% two years ago.

These are not projections. These are operating metrics from businesses that are already running differently.

The summit featured a panel of operators who made the abstract concrete.

Tim Francis runs a digital marketing agency. He used AI to encode 30 years of SEO knowledge into a customized system, automated proposal generation, client onboarding, and website production, and compressed his team while expanding output. When asked what really changed, he didn't mention revenue. He said: “I get to be a human being now, not just a human doing.”

Josh Hart is a non-technical operator running a luxury wine logistics company in Napa Valley with about 70 employees. He rebuilt his company's website himself overnight with no coding background, moved 228 pallets of stagnant inventory in a matter of months, and is 92% of the way through replacing an expensive, archaic warehouse management system. His approach: solve one module at a time, treat AI like a coworker, and train employees to do the same. One of his team members transformed a process from 90 minutes to 5 minutes, expanding capacity from 5 clients to 50.

David Dodge is a real estate investor in St. Louis who has flipped roughly 1,000 houses over 15 years. His AI system has its own seat in the CRM, its own phone, its own email. It scrapes listings, identifies deals, sends offers, negotiates, and escalates to him only when it encounters a situation it can't resolve. He works one to two hours a day. He has zero coding skills.

These are not Silicon Valley startups. They are Main Street businesses: an agency in Oklahoma City, a warehouse in Napa, a house flipper in St. Louis. They are AI Forward not because they bought a subscription to a chatbot, but because they restructured how their business operates around intelligence.

Here is the idea I can't shake since leaving that room.

The SBA already runs one of the most important certification programs in American business. The 8(a) Business Development Program, HUBZone, Women-Owned Small Business, and Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned certifications don't just confer status. They unlock access: to government contracts, to set-aside procurement, to a share of the roughly trillion-dollar federal budget.

Certifications work because they derisk. They tell a lender, a contracting officer, or a procurement team: this business has been vetted. It meets a standard. You can extend capital or opportunity with greater confidence.

Now apply that logic to AI adoption.

What if there were an “AI Forward” certification for small businesses? Not a badge for using ChatGPT. A meaningful attestation that a business has integrated AI into its core operations in ways that improve financial durability, operational efficiency, and competitive positioning.

The data from today's summit suggests what the criteria could look like:

There are two models worth considering.

Either model would accomplish the same thing: create a virtuous cycle where AI adoption is recognized, incentivized, and rewarded, because the evidence shows it produces better business outcomes.

Hartley Caldwell, the SBA's CIO and Chief AI Officer, said something at the summit that keeps coming back to me. He described his vantage point: “I get a front row seat to a couple hundred thousand small businesses a year.”

That front-row seat gives the SBA something no other institution has: scale-level visibility into what makes small businesses succeed or fail. The agency already uses AI internally to detect fraud, having removed $550 million in fraudulent contracts. It already certifies businesses for contracting eligibility. It already distributes capital through a network of more than 5,000 lenders.

An AI Forward certification would extend the SBA's existing model into the most consequential technology shift of our time. It would give lenders a signal. It would give businesses a goal. And it would give the agency data on which adoption patterns actually correlate with survival and growth, data that could refine lending decisions, target technical assistance, and inform policy.

Shevelenko made the observation that the SBA is “no longer just funding small businesses. It is funding the model that big businesses are racing to copy.” He's right. Enterprise companies are spending billions trying to become leaner, faster, and more AI-enabled. The SBA is already backing the businesses that are naturally built that way. A certification would make that advantage visible and bankable.

One of the summit's strongest themes was that the old distinction between “small businesses” and “startups” is becoming less useful. Shevelenko used the example of a three-person SaaS company in San Francisco and an eight-person HVAC company in Charleston. Both are founder-operated, lean, and trying to do the work of much larger teams. The historical difference was access to technology. AI eliminates that gap.

Ashok Srivastava from Intuit put it in economic terms: “When something becomes cheaper and more efficient, people use more of it.” Intelligence is getting cheaper. So people are using more of it. And the businesses that use it well are outperforming the ones that don't.

Alexandra Clark from Shopify went further: the internet used to reward popularity; AI-enabled discovery increasingly rewards relevance. That means niche businesses, hyper-focused operators, and single-product merchants can find buyers in ways that were structurally impossible five years ago. Forty-one percent of new Shopify merchants are starting with just one product. “Niche is hot right now,” she said.

Even the State Department weighed in. Dr. Fletcher, who oversees the department's AI deployment, shared a story about rolling out an AI tool to 100,000 employees. The first 3,000 beta users were power users. On launch day, despite expecting 50,000 activations, only 3,050 people showed up. The technology worked. The adoption didn't. Her takeaway: “It doesn't matter at all without change management, without training.”

America turns 250 next month. The SBA was founded after World War II to help ordinary citizens build businesses with the tools of their time. The tools have changed. The mission hasn't.

Today, a one-person team can have the cognitive capacity of a much larger organization. A wine warehouse operator can rebuild enterprise software by describing the problem in plain English. A real estate investor can run a deal pipeline that used to require a team of five. A marketing founder can get bored because AI handled everything that used to consume his days.

The question is no longer whether AI works for small businesses. The question is whether we build the systems to recognize, reward, and scale the businesses that are doing it well.

An AI Forward certification would be that system. It would tell lenders: this business is built to last. It would tell policymakers: this is what modern entrepreneurship looks like. And it would tell every small business owner in America: there is a path forward, and it starts with how you operate, not how much capital you have.

The SBA and Perplexity took the first step today. The next step is making AI Forward a standard, not just a slogan.