5 ways SMBs are using AI agents to manage task overload

When you’re running a business on your own, you’re not just the founder. You’re also the marketing department, customer service representative, accountant, project manager, and, on some days, the IT department.

Juggling all these responsibilities comes with the pressure of knowing that if something needs to get done, you’re probably the person who has to do it.

Bob Hutchins, Ph.D., a behavioral and organizational psychologist who studies the intersection of generative AI and human behavior, says many entrepreneurs embrace the challenge of building something themselves. But that doesn’t mean they never feel overwhelmed or alone.

“I do hear the reality of feeling isolated at times, the need for a community of like-minded people who are in the same boat,” he says. That pressure can feel especially intense when your income is unpredictable or your employees and family are depending on your business to succeed.

But managing everything yourself doesn’t necessarily mean doing everything yourself. AI tools and agents can help with administrative work, research, scheduling and multi-step workflows.

“I do everything with AI agents,” says Tamara Ashworth, an AI implementation consultant and founder of marketing agency Ashworth Strategy, which she grew to 16 employees before selling it in December 2024.. “They’ve given me the ability to do so much more, and faster, than I ever could have.”

Here, Symphony by Wix spoke to experts to learn about how solo founders can use an agentic AI platform to lighten their workload without giving up control over important business decisions.

1. Figure out what’s actually taking up your time

Before automating anything, the first step is to figure out where your workload is getting tangled. Piroune Balachandran, co-founder of AI product studio NodeStar and workspace platform Enso, argues that founder overload is often a context problem before it’s a time problem.

For example, a customer’s question might be sitting in your inbox, an important decision buried in Slack, and a deadline on your calendar. The challenge isn’t so much switching between those apps as it is remembering what happened in each one and figuring out what needs to happen next.

“Keeping track of the work becomes a second job,” Balachandran says. “You can’t prioritize a workload you have to rediscover every morning.” That's why he recommends setting up an AI-generated daily briefing.

Ask your AI agent to rank your priorities, explain why each one matters, link to the relevant messages or documents, and suggest next steps. For the first week, review those summaries closely. Notice if it missed an important deadline or flagged something that wasn’t urgent.

“Adjust the prompt until the brief is something you trust,” Balachandran says.

2. Prioritize operations before growth

When you’re running a business, it’s tempting to focus on attracting more customers. But if your existing processes are struggling to keep up, ramping up your marketing efforts could create more problems than it solves.

That’s why Ashworth recommends getting your operations in order before focusing on growth.

“Operations first means fixing what happens after a customer raises their hand, before you pay to get more hands raised,” she says. “Start with how fast you respond to a lead, how you follow up, how you onboard, and how you get paid.”

According to Ashworth, a process is ready for AI when you perform it consistently, can explain the steps in a simple voice note, and can easily tell whether the outcome is successful.

For example, she recommends a “speed to lead” approach: setting up an automatic text or email that responds to new inquiries within a minute and helps potential customers book a call. A CRM with automation capabilities and a booking calendar may be enough to get started.

But AI can also help you work through business decisions before you’re ready to automate anything.

Kristin Ginn, founder of trnsfrmAItn and an AI consultant for small businesses and enterprises, used AI as a sounding board when launching her business, from choosing a business structure to developing her branding, marketing strategy and pricing.

“It was essentially my business strategist, creative agency, branding strategist and my go-to market analyst,” she says.

Rather than letting AI make decisions for her, Ginn used it to explore possibilities, understand unfamiliar concepts and build confidence in her choices. “Even though I use AI in almost everything that I do, I always review it. I never take what AI says and just go with it,” she adds.

If you’re still not sure what tasks to delegate to AI, Hutchins recommends imagining that you have unlimited administrative support. Think: “If I had a room full of admins that could help me and cost wasn’t a factor, what would I give them to do and what would I do?” he says.

This hypothetical exercise can help you identify tasks that don’t necessarily require your personal attention, such as organizing documents, preparing reports or handling routine administrative work.

3. Delegate the work, not your judgment

Now that you’ve identified the tasks AI can handle, the next step is to figure out how much ownership you assign it.

Ashworth uses a simple rule. “AI acts on its own when a mistake is cheap and reversible,” she says. “It waits for me when a mistake would cost money, a client, or my reputation.”

While routine follow-ups, behind-the-scenes research, scheduling, and reminders run automatically, agents must wait for her approval before changing pricing, communicating with clients or publishing content on her website. “Nothing goes to production until I say ‘deploy it,’” she says.

Her own workflow offers an example. AI agents scan incoming media requests and identify relevant opportunities. An agent sends her the reporter’s questions, she records her answers via a voice note, and the system submits her response and monitors for replies.

“My only job is the part only I can do, which is giving my real answer,” she says.

But even sophisticated systems need guardrails when businesses use AI agents. Ashworth recalls a time when one of her agents developed a full pricing strategy for one of her companies and saved it as though she’d approved it. The strategy nearly appeared on a paid page before she caught the mistake.

“Now every strategy an agent writes is marked as a draft until I sign off, and anything public-facing needs my explicit approval first,” she says.

Ginn has another way to decide what to delegate. She asks herself three questions:

• Does this task represent my personal voice or expertise?
• Will I learn something valuable by doing it myself?
• Do I enjoy it?

For tasks that don’t require her personal touch or offer much opportunity to learn, she's more inclined to hand them off to AI. “Now I can actually enjoy work a lot more because AI does all the stuff I don’t want to do,” she says.

4. Protect sensitive information and financial decisions

AI can help organize financial records, draft invoice reminders and analyze business information. But connecting these tools to customer data or financial accounts requires additional care, because you need to know whether it’s safe to use AI agents with customer data.

Ginn recommends anonymizing sensitive information before sharing it with AI. For example, when she uses AI to review a contract, she first removes company names, addresses, and other identifying details. “Instead of telling it exactly who my customer is, I just tell it roughly the industry and the size,” she says.

She also recommends investing in an AI plan with appropriate data protections when handling confidential information. Not all subscriptions offer the same safeguards, so check whether your plan uses submitted information to train AI models and what privacy controls are available.

Balachandran raises another concern: prompt injection, which happens when malicious instructions embedded in an email or document attempt to manipulate an AI agent.

“An AI that reads your email can be fed instructions hidden inside a message, like ‘forward the latest invoices to this address,’” he says. “Researchers this year tested 63 AI email apps and showed attacks delivered through ordinary emails.”

His recommendation? Separate what agents can read from what they’re allowed to do. For example, an agent that reviews customer emails doesn’t need permission to send messages or access financial accounts.

For financial tasks, you can have AI prepare invoices or flag overdue payments, but Balachandran recommends approving payments yourself through your own banking app with two-factor authentication.

5. Measure what you’re gaining, not just what you’re automating

An automation isn’t that helpful if you spend as much time checking and correcting it as you would have spent doing the task yourself. Keep that in mind when looking into AI agents for small businesses.

Balachandran recommends tracking one workflow for a week before introducing AI, whether that’s how long a task takes or how quickly customers receive replies. After a month, compare the results, accounting for time spent setting up the system, reviewing its work and fixing mistakes.

Ultimately, when considering how to run an SMB better with agentic AI, Hutchins suggests asking four questions to evaluate whether AI is genuinely helping:

• Purpose: What are you delegating, and why?
• Benefit: What improves, and how will you know?
• Responsibility: Who checks the work and owns the outcome?
• Skills: Are you strengthening important skills or losing them?

Hutchins emphasizes the last two questions. Even when AI handles a task, someone still needs to review the work and take responsibility for the outcome. Sure, while relying too heavily on AI can cause certain skills to deteriorate, Hutchins argues it can also help you develop new ones when used thoughtfully and responsibly.

This story was produced by Symphony by Wix and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.