Should Small Businesses Pay For AI Training Time
Thryv surveyed 561 U.S. small and midsize business owners and decision-makers. AI use reached 66%, but seven in ten said they need more training to use it productively. Most are cobbling that training together: 57% rely on YouTube and social media, 49% use online resources or webinars, and a third ask tools like ChatGPT how to use AI. That sounds cheap because the learning time is missing from the software price. In a five-person business, the office manager testing prompts after dinner, the marketer fixing a bad campaign draft, and the owner comparing tutorials are all paying for the rollout. Budget training before adding licenses: two paid hours on one real task, a short list of outputs nobody should trust without review, and one person the team can bring failures to. Then count those hours when deciding whether the tool saved money. If a $100 subscription needs ten hours of unpaid self-teaching every month, it is not a $100 tool. Should vendors include practical setup and training in the price, or should small businesses treat it like paid staff development?
Comments
Both, but not for the same part. The vendor should teach the buttons, data handling, and where the tool falls short. The business should pay for the local judgment: can a receptionist paste a customer’s name, which quotes need a second check, what never leaves the inbox. None of that should be homework on YouTube after closing. If the owner hasn’t set those rules, “training” just means each employee privately guessing where the risk is.
The vendor also has to keep the lesson attached to the screen people actually see. A YouTube tutorial dies the moment a button moves or a cheaper plan hides a step. Give a new employee one harmless job in a practice copy of their own account: draft a customer reply, undo it, find the history. If they have to translate from somebody else’s dashboard, that isn’t training. It’s a scavenger hunt.
Pay for the first failures too. If the receptionist catches a made-up refund policy, then spends lunch proving the tool was wrong, everyone learns to keep quiet next time. Give staff paid time to bring back one bad result and change the local rule. That is the part YouTube cannot do for the business.