Students earning cash with their first side hustle, parents working full-time to support their families and retirees pursuing their entrepreneurial dreams are among those harnessing AI to build their businesses.
The release of new generative AI products is empowering sole businesspeople — aka solopreneurs — to develop businesses they only dreamed of building just a few years ago.
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In 2022, there were 29.8 million solopreneurs, defined as self-employed people with no employees, in the U.S., according to the most recent census data. They generated about $1.7 trillion, or 6.8% of the U.S. economy. California had the highest number of solopreneurs (3,502,950), but on a per-capita basis, Florida led the way with 13.3 solopreneurs for every 100 people (1).
Technologies like generative AI are helping entrepreneurial Americans bootstrap their businesses, even if they don’t have a lot of resources. But can it work for you?
AI is growing among small businesses
A 2025 study by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that 58% of small businesses are using generative AI, up from 40% in 2024 and 23% in 2023. At this point, it’s used mainly for customer engagement and inventory management, but 84% of respondents plan to increase their use of technology platforms (2).
“AI allows small businesses — who many times do not have the staff or resources of their competitors — to punch above their weight,” Jordan Crenshaw, senior vice-president of the U.S. Chamber’s technology engagement center, said in a statement (3).
This is also the case for solopreneurs — like Angela Berardino, who started a boutique marketing firm.
Berardino told CNBC that at the startup level, “AI has given me an army of admins and interns that take notes on calls, do first rounds of research and help me analyze large data sets.” Now, her business has grown enough that she leads a team of humans.
Supporting the solopreneur journey
Using AI to support the solopreneur journey can begin before the company is even started.
Mark Valentino, head of business banking for Citizens Bank in L.A., claimed to CNBC that “An interested individual could start a side hustle in 10 minutes” by using OpenAI’s free text generator ChatGPT to create a business plan. And that plan “would probably be solid enough” for a first draft to be put in front of a bank or U.S. Small Business Administration lender, he argued (4).
AI could potentially facilitate the first one-person “unicorn,” an industry term for startup companies with billion-dollar valuations, an article in *The Economist *speculated.
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Solopreneur Sarah Gwilliam, who came up with an idea for an AI-powered tool to support families through the process of grieving a loved one, told The Economist that her project is “still more of an early-stage startup than an established business.”
So she joined a startup incubator for AI businesses, which has helped her set up her business, and — if the company gains traction — will provide capital, product development, sales, marketing and back-office support (5).
Indeed, AI tools are now available for almost every business function, from branding and writing social media posts, to scheduling meetings, taking notes and helping with customer support.
A few cautions about AI
While AI can help solopreneurs expand their reach, they should also be aware of the risks, such as data privacy breaches and intellectual property infringement.
Widely available generative AI products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini are trained on data scraped from the internet. That includes a lot of personal data —such as emails, phone numbers and addresses — that were obtained without users’ consent, and can be spat back out in the tools’ outputs. You could also inadvertently expose your proprietary data by putting it into a model. So make sure you’re familiar with privacy settings and federal and state privacy laws, and learn how to protect yourself (6).
Generative AI models also inevitably reproduce biases, such as racism and misogyny, from their training data, and generate hallucinations (incorrect and unwanted outputs). It’s therefore important that a human reviews AI-generated outputs (7).
Even “A single hallucination can ripple into financial loss, legal issues or misinformation,” Majeed Javdani, principal quality auditor at Conformity Systems Corp., wrote in Entrepreneur magazine.
“Use AI only as a tool to support execution, not to design the strategy or own the decisions,” he wrote, adding you should treat AI as if it’s useful but “never in charge” (8).
It’s a good idea to have an understanding of the compliance and legal implications of AI use before integrating it into your business.
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Article Sources
We rely only on vetted sources and credible third-party reporting. For details, see our editorial ethics and guidelines.
U.S. Census (1); U.S. Chamber of Commerce (2); U.S. Chamber of Commerce (3); CNBC (4); The Economist (5); DLA Piper (6); IBM (7); Entrepreneur (8)
This article provides information only and should not be construed as advice. It is provided without warranty of any kind.