It's time to make AI work for SMEs

In Douglas Adams's The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a supercomputer called Deep Thought is built to answer the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. It takes 7.5 million years to compute. The answer it gives is “42”. Nobody knows what to do with it.

AI has the capacity to transform how small businesses operate. And yet, the format that brought this technology to the mainstream — the all-knowing chatbot, ready to answer any question on any topic — has created a kind of "Deep Thought" paradox. The possibilities seem so endless, the questions so many, and the limitations so vague, that many business owners simply don't know where to start.

Right now, the world's largest companies are hiring entire teams dedicated to figuring out how to implement AI, and yet even with all that firepower, most are still in the process of working it out. The expectation for small business owners is rather different: sit down with a generalist AI tool, which can feel like an amorphous blob of capability with no particular understanding of your business, and somehow know exactly the right questions to ask.

In a Mastercard study of 2,700 small businesses across Asia Pacific, on average more than a third of respondents currently spend on AI, with the vast majority planning to increase spend on AI and other technologies. Remarkably, up to 79 percent are open to using agentic payments in their businesses — that is, payments for everyday business needs, from supplier invoices to office supplies, that are initiated and completed autonomously by AI. It's a shift Mastercard is already enabling: this year marks one year since the launch of Agent Pay, and most recently, we’ve seen agentic transactions for B2B payments go live in Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and India.

Making Artificial Intelligence Intelligible

The solution to an amorphous blob is, unsurprisingly, to give it shape. The AI industry has spent the past few years in a capabilities race; a race to build models that are faster, more powerful, more general-purpose. That's produced genuinely remarkable technology. But for the small business owner trying to work out whether they can afford to take on a new supplier, the raw power of a general-purpose AI is beside the point. They need a tool that already knows what to look for.

AI for small business can't operate in a vacuum. A model that knows everything about the world but nothing about your business is just the amorphous blob repackaged. What turns AI from a novelty into a genuine operating advantage is context — real insight into how a business manages its cash flow, how its costs are shifting relative to its peers, where the risks and opportunities sit. That kind of intelligence is built over years of real commercial activity. The more specific the data, the more useful the AI.

From Compute Power to Commercial Intelligence

At Mastercard, AI isn't new territory. We've been embedding it across our network for over a decade. It underpins how we score and approve billions of transactions a year, how we detect fraud in real time, and how we protect the businesses and consumers who depend on our network. What is new is the opportunity to point that same intelligence outward; to take the data and insight we've built through years of powering commerce for millions of businesses across the region and use it to help those businesses make smarter decisions about how they operate and grow. That's the thinking behind Virtual C-Suite: a set of AI-powered capabilities designed not as another chatbot, but as something closer to the exeutive team most small businesses don’t have the resources to hire. A virtual CFO that understands your cash flow because it can see how your spending patterns compare to others in your sector. A virtual CISO that monitors your cyber exposure using the same threat intelligence we use to protect the world's largest financial institutions. The AI has been given a role, a domain, and a purpose — shaped around the way a business owner actually thinks about their day.

Virtual C-Suite is one product, but it represents a broader shift in how AI should be delivered to the businesses that drive our economies. Across the APEC region, MSMEs account for over 97% of all businesses, the majority of private-sector employment, and roughly half of economic output. Most of their owners are working sixty-hour weeks before they even think about technology strategy. They need AI that arrives ready to work. Tools that are scoped to their problems, informed by their data, and designed to surface answers without demanding that they first become experts in asking the right questions.

The technology industry has spent the past few years building the most powerful computer ever made. Now we need to make sure the answers it gives sound less like "the meaning of life is 42" and more like "your cash flow is tightening — here are three things you can do about it."