By Ciarán Quilty, Senior Vice-President for International at Intuit
Ask any small and mid-sized business owner what they’re short on, and they’ll probably say time. But more than the hours that are missing, it’s focus, clarity, and space to think. What’s stealing that bandwidth isn’t always obvious: an invoice you forgot to chase, a system that doesn’t sync, another tool demanding your attention.
Time is rarely lost to a single catastrophic blocker but a thousand invisible cuts. Less death by one decision and more by constant distraction.
The average SMB today operates with more digital tools than ever before. One of our own recent studies found that some will use eight or more tools. These aren’t only high-growth startups but also include solo founders, family firms, side hustlers scaling into storefronts.
Yet more tools haven’t meant more time. In fact, the opposite. When systems don’t talk to each other, the business owner becomes the middleware, chasing files, correcting errors, switching tabs. It becomes harder to notice the time tax until you try to gain focus. Even as 62% of Canadian small businesses now use AI – up from 51% just months ago – many still find themselves doing manual, low-leverage tasks that automation could have solved. And that’s the real problem we’re trying to solve with automation, both speed and focus.
What problem are we really solving?
Fragmentation both steals time and blocks progress. If data is scattered across platforms, AI can’t help you. If customer records don’t sync, your team spends its day fixing workflows instead of building relationships.
On the flip side of the tech transformation is a reality that many SMBs still don’t use basic digital tools. That’s not because they’re lazy or slow, but because what’s on offer is often too complex, too disconnected, or too enterprise-focused to serve them. For example, only 30 per cent of Canadian businesses use HR or payroll software, and just 31 per cent use email marketing or cloud platforms – highlighting how enterprise-grade solutions often don’t scale down.
There’s been a lot of noise about AI doing your work. But the most valuable thing AI might do is help you stop doing the things that don’t matter.
When we talk about automation, we should be honest: this isn’t about replacing people but clearing the underbrush. The repetitive, low-leverage tasks that keep business leaders from doing what only they can do.
AI becomes relevant less because it’s shiny and new, but because it helps you recover your attention. One example we’ve seen in practice: an AI agent notices a customer has been late paying six times in a row. Before you even hit send on the invoice, it flags this and suggests adding a late payment fee, a small change that increases your odds of getting paid on time by up to 10x. The cash comes in quicker. Your mental load drops. That’s intelligence in service of the real problem of getting paid faster. And it’s not just about faster cash flow. Canadian businesses using AI reported they are 16 times more likely to report increased revenue and nearly three times more likely to say their workdays are shorter.
The ROI from AI is a secondary question
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: the biggest barrier to AI isn’t cost but chaos. If your data isn’t in one place, structured, connected, and accurate, AI has nothing to work with.
This is not a structural problem. The Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Index shows that many SMBs are incredibly resilient but deeply vulnerable to complexity. They create the majority of jobs yet remain the least equipped to benefit from the AI transformation unless we fix the basics.
We need action that supports better policies, simpler digital adoption, and clearer pathways to automation. Especially when 55 per cent of Canadian small businesses say digital tools improved efficiency and saved time, and 37 per cent say they reduced errors – benefits too valuable to be left on the table due to complexity. But the principle applies far beyond any one initiative: if we want SMBs to thrive, we must stop assuming they’re ready to adopt tools built for enterprises.
AI is not the strategy but a lever. The question I often hear is “what’s the ROI on AI?” The better question is what do I care about, and how can technology help me spend more time on that? Do I care about getting paid faster? Retaining more customers? Spending less time reconciling payments? Then let’s focus on automation there.
Don’t fall in love with the tech. Fall in love with the problem. This is why the next wave of SMB innovation will come from simplifying the technology stack, connecting the dots, and making the right decisions easier to take. Getting back to purpose and prosperity.
We talk about entrepreneurship like it’s a heroic solo journey. In reality, it’s often one person doing five jobs, across ten apps, with twelve hours that should have been eight.
The opportunity here is less technical and more emotional. Imagine logging in and seeing your most urgent tasks already handled. Your insights surfaced for you. Your next move, clearer. That’s a quiet revolution already underway and it’s built on a single principle: Business owners should spend more time being owners, and less time being operators.
In our quest to counter the time thief, let’s stop asking ‘how do we use more AI?’ and instead, ‘how do we help more business owners get back to their purpose?’
Ciarán Quilty, Senior Vice-President for International at Intuit Bio
Ciarán is a technology and business leader with over 25 years’ experience in software, consulting and digital. Following global roles at Meta and Accenture, Ciarán now serves as Senior Vice President at Intuit running the company’s international business. His journey, from software engineer to commercial leader, has been anchored to one goal – empowering small and medium-sized businesses worldwide to thrive through technology. Ciarán is bringing this goal to life at Intuit through the power of AI and development of a platform that small and medium-sized businesses can rely on every day to run and grow their business, driving their revenue and profitability.
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