AI might be faster and cheaper than physical alternatives for certain tasks, but sometimes you need a human touch. Photo: Pharos University.
Video didn’t kill the radio star, e-books didn’t kill the bookshop, and AI won’t kill small business. But it will change the marketplace, and that will impact certain niche businesses in Canberra.
AI is revolutionising medicine, assisting people with disabilities, transforming insurance and finance, but also threatening white-collar jobs (and aren’t the unions terrified).
It is also being embraced by the big end of the music industry as a way to make songs without having to deal with troublesome, pesky human beings. Where will that lead?
But there’s another, quieter disruption underway, one that will change the world of sole traders and niche consultants. The people who’ve carved out a living in Canberra are doing things that machines are now learning to do faster and cheaper.
Take the CV writer – a Canberra specialty. A good one doesn’t just format your work history – they help you find confidence and translate your experiences into language that gets past the bots and into the hands of an interview committee or a human recruiter.
But now, AI can churn out a decent résumé in seconds. It won’t ask you how you’re feeling about your career change. It won’t sense your uncertainty when you say, “I haven’t worked since I had kids”. But it will be free, or close to it.
That’s both good news and a problem.
There are also freelance copywriters, speechwriters and grant writing specialists. The people who, for a fee, help charities and not-for-profits win funding, or who write heartfelt speeches for nervous executives or those who have never spoken in public before.
AI can do all of that now … sort of. It can mimic tone and structure and even throw in a joke.
It cannot, however, sit with someone who’s never written a word and help them find their voice. It can provide good wedding speeches, but it doesn’t know your Dad’s sense of humour. It certainly (hopefully) doesn’t know about the family scandal that happened 10 years ago that must never, ever be alluded to, even accidentally.
These aren’t just jobs. They’re relationships. They’re trust-based services built on empathy, subtlety and nuance, or on forthrightness and confrontation and on lived experience.
And they’re under threat, not because they’re obsolete, but because they’re being undercut by tools that are “good enough” for people who can’t afford better.
Another group are the Canberra scribes who sit silently in thousands of public sector interviews. Will they be replaced by recordings that are then AI’d into a recommendation?
I’m not anti-AI, quite the opposite. We do, however, still need to ask: who gets left behind when the market decides that “good enough” is OK?
Then again, while progress is often damaging for some, it may be beneficial for others. This is also a story of opportunity.
History shows that predictions of technological doom are often premature. It’s worth remembering that the ubiquitous phone camera didn’t kill professional photography. There may not be as many photographers, but they still exist because they can’t be matched for quality.
I also recall when former senator Nick Sherry declared in 2011 that bookshops would disappear within five years; he was wrong. Independent bookshops didn’t just survive, they adapted, specialised, and in many cases thrived. They became community hubs, visceral experiences and places of random discovery in a world of algorithmic predictability.
It’s the same with AI.
Many services will be automated, but others will become more valuable precisely because they are not automated.
People will pay for authenticity, for human connection, for expertise that isn’t scraped from the internet. For spontaneity.
A good CV writer also coaches interview skills. A copywriter will understand local culture, politics and personalities. A grant writer will know how to navigate bureaucracy and build relationships with funders. A scribe will learn about and can interpret body language.
And new businesses will emerge. There’s a whole ecosystem waiting to be built.
Let’s watch and listen to small business owners, especially the quiet achievers. Let’s not make the same mistake we made with bookshops, writing them off before we’ve even asked what they might become.
Because in the end, the future of small business isn’t about machines. It’s about people. And people, thankfully, are still irreplaceable.
Aren’t they?
