Why More Business Owners Are Finally Jumping In On AI

For years, plenty of business owners rolled their eyes at AI. It sounded like something built for coders and tech startups, not for people running drug testing companies or real estate deals. But two recent articles show how that thinking is starting to fall apart, and how the owners who resisted the longest are now some of the biggest believers.

In a recent article published at Tampa Bay Business and Wealth, David Bell explained that at first, he didn’t want anything to do with AI, saying, “I’m one of the few people who genuinely didn’t want anything to do with AI. I run a national workplace drug testing company. My days are already full of compliance rules, client calls, and the stress of keeping a large operation running across the whole country. AI sounded like something for tech people. Not for someone who spends his time thinking about chain of custody forms and DOT regulations.” 

He explained that AI felt like a distraction from what he considered the “real” work he needed to focus on.

That changed when the pressure got too heavy to ignore. Bell said that regulations were shifting and a faster pace and his client list kept growing, all while he wanted every caller to feel like a real person was listening, not a machine. 

He put it simply: “I wish I could tell you I turned to AI because I saw where the industry was headed. I didn’t. I turned to it because I was stuck and needed to solve real problems, fast.”

Fear held him back at first

Bell wasn’t shy about the real reasons he waited so long. 

Drug testing depends on trust and accuracy, and one slip can cost someone their job. 

He wrote that he worried AI would turn his company cold, “like those automated phone systems everyone hates calling at their bank.” His clients call him stressed out, often while dealing with a crisis and he didn’t want them stuck talking to an automated system.

What finally pushed him forward wasn’t a grand vision—it was exhaustion. Bell said he couldn’t keep pace with regulatory changes on his own anymore, so he tried AI in one small corner of the business first before trusting it with more.

He also credited a chance meeting for opening his eyes. 

Bell shared a panel with Tatiana Zagorovski, a nationally known expert on AI for business, and said she showed him “not only what was possible with AI, but also how it worked.”

Rules that never sit still

Workplace drug testing law is a moving target. Federal rules shift, state marijuana laws change without warning, and what works in Florida might not fly in Ohio. Bell said tracking it all by hand had become its own job and pulled his staff away from interacting with clients.

So he started using AI to watch for these changes and summarize them. As Bell explained, “It didn’t replace my team. It gave them a head start.” His staff no longer needed to comb through dense legal language line by line. They got the short version first, then applied their own judgment where it mattered most.

Freeing people up for the hard calls

Running locations across the country means nonstop scheduling, reporting, and paperwork. Bell brought AI in to help with those repetitive jobs and to flag problems early. That gave his team room to focus on harder, more human tasks, like talking an anxious employer through a tough situation.

He said something that surprised even him: AI didn’t make his client relationships feel more distant. It actually made them stronger. Bell wrote, “Now I use AI to track where every relationship actually stands.” If a client hasn’t heard back in weeks, he knows before they have to remind him. The tools track the details and his team personally makes the calls.

Bell believes this gap between him and slower competitors turned into a real edge. “We respond faster than most of our competitors,” he wrote, adding that clients notice when his team already has an answer ready before they even ask the question.

A parallel warning from an AI expert

While Bell was learning this firsthand, Zagorovski was watching the same pattern play out across dozens of businesses from the other side. In an article published at Search Engine Land, she warned that too many entrepreneurs are wasting time and money on AI instead of using it strategically.

Zagorovski said a common mistake is reinventing the wheel by building new versions of tools that already exist. 

“I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve seen brag about using AI to build a new CRM when hundreds of solid platforms already exist,” she explained. Her point wasn’t that AI is a bad investment. It’s that copying what’s already out there rarely helps.

Instead, Zagorovski pointed to something closer to what Bell discovered on his own: using AI to solve a real, measurable problem. She described using it to study market conditions quickly so she could make sharper pricing calls when buying and selling property. “This is where AI really shines,” Zagorovski wrote, since it can sort through huge amounts of data faster than any person could alone.

Her larger message lines up with what Bell lived through. As she put it, “Businesses that implement AI effectively will likely outperform competitors that are slower to improve operational efficiency and response times.”

Starting small is the real lesson

Both accounts land on the same advice for owners still holding back. 

Bell said business owners don’t need to become experts before they start. “Find one bottleneck in your business,” he wrote. “Maybe it’s paperwork. Maybe it’s staying on top of regulations in your industry.” His advice was blunt: stop waiting for the moment you feel ready, because that moment rarely comes on its own.

Zagorovski echoed that same principle from the technology side, explaining that the most useful AI tools are usually the least flashy ones. They quietly cut down missed calls, speed up replies, and remove small tasks that eat up a day. She summed it up saying: “If an AI system doesn’t measurably improve revenue, efficiency, customer experience, or decision-making, it’s worth questioning whether it needs to exist at all.”

For Bell, the payoff wasn’t the plan he set out to build. It was something better in the long run. “AI didn’t replace the personal service my clients expect from us,” he wrote. “It gave my team more room to deliver even more of it.”

Together, these two stories offer a simple takeaway for any owner still on the fence. 

AI isn’t about chasing trends or building something flashy. It’s about finding the one slow, frustrating part of a business and letting technology take it off someone’s plate so your team can spend their time where it actually counts.