Small and midsize businesses (SMBs) are as dependent as ever on the latest technology trends that will enable their companies to prosper, from the fintech platforms that run their payment systems to leveraging social media to reach a broader audience. As part of Yahoo Finance's Small Business, Big Opportunities special, Builder.ai Founder and CEO Sachin Dev Duggal sits down with Akiko Fujita at the 2024 Milken Conference to talk about how businesses are fighting "the fear of irrelevance" in the transition to becoming digitally native and embrace new software that will help owners scale and grow. "What we're seeing is that depending on when you speak to that small-medium business, they're either really excited to go do something because they feel like they're gonna unshackle themselves," Duggal says. "Or they're actually quite fearful because they've heard of a bad experience, they've had a bad experience, and almost it becomes 10 times harder to then get them out of the shelf." But Duggal is largely seeing positive growth when businesses do enact these changes. One big factor is how SMBs are adopting AI and other large-language models like ChatGPT to automate certain workflows, including marketing and copyrighting promotional materials. Duggal cites increased productivity per employee and enhanced customer engagements as another pair of benefits from AI: "Now we're seeing this really nice hybrid between user interface (UI) elements, chat experiences, personalization, so that these small-medium businesses can talk to their customers in the way the customer wants to talk to them." Addressing fears of job replacement and workplace reductions fueled by AI, Duggal ultimately believes artificial intelligence is useful in cutting out mundane tasks and will benefit workers by "[putting] a cape on a human to make them superhuman. And so you are actually being more productive." Catch more of Yahoo Finance's coverage at the 2024 Milken Institute Global Conference and its Small Business: Big Opportunities special from this week. This post was written by Luke Carberry Mogan.