Understanding OpenAI's collection of tools for small businesses

The world’s biggest private startup is turning its eye to small businesses.

OpenAI’s newly formed small and medium-sized business team has rolled out a new starter pack of partner plug-ins meant to help founders begin using AI for their businesses. The collection spans prebuilt workflows and skills around payroll, sales, and bookkeeping from the likes of HubSpot, fintech company Mercury, small business-focused CRM HoneyBook, and HR platform Gusto.

Margaret Ann Seger, who leads product for OpenAI’s growth team, said small business owners can expect more offerings tailored to their needs as the frontier AI company homes in on a segment of companies that makes up a major chunk of the US GDP and workforce. It’s not the only AI provider that’s been doubling down on this segment lately.

“There’s just a huge economy here that is pretty underserved,” Seger told us. “We’ve spun up this team to start helping folks discover that a bit more intentionally and scale it within their teams.”

How small businesses use AI

Whereas larger enterprises tend to focus on empowering each of the many departments they already have, small business owners want AI that can handle administrative tasks that are outside their core expertise—functions like marketing, sales, legal, and coding websites, Seger said.

More recently, small businesses have been increasingly using AI for data analytics, Seger said, adding that they want a way to connect all of their various tools to allow the AI to generate more informed insights about their business.

“When you hook up all these tools and you get more of the data pulled in, you can start to understand where there’s optimization opportunities,” she said. “People want to be able to dump everything into one central place, analyze that as a whole, and then pull that out and make decisions within the tools.”

The 16 tools in OpenAI’s SMB collection were chosen based on their existing popularity among small businesses. They range from household-name workplace tools like Intuit, PayPal, and Shopify to smaller SMB-focused startups: HoneyBook, Gusto, Mercury. Seger said the missing link that will likely be addressed in future additions is around analyzing point-of-sale data.

Data privacy and safety

With all of this data integration, however, small business owners are also very concerned about what’s being done with their data and how to use these tools safely. Seger said that trust was a big theme when OpenAI held a series of cross-country small business workshops earlier this summer. OpenAI says that it never uses any data from any of its paying customers for training purposes, and doesn’t share data with third parties for advertising.

“For example, we talked to a business owner who was worried that because they had connected their Gmail…that we were sending their data to Google, and Google was using that for ads-related stuff,” Seger said. “And we’re like, no, no, no. That’s not how this works.”

What’s next

Seger said OpenAI is currently focused on the onboarding stage of small business adoption—showing them what’s possible beyond chat windows. She said that fewer than 10% of the SMBs on the platform use any plug-ins, and may not know the difference between its Work mode—in which it can perform agentic tasks—and Chat mode.

As adoption picks up, Seger said the team will focus more on tools for different kinds of small companies beyond general administrative and business functions. The team is also focused on talking to SMBs that are using AI successfully and creating educational tools to replicate their success.

But “onboarding and discovery” still remain the biggest challenges for OpenAI. “Use cases in onboarding are not interesting or particularly innovative, but those are the biggest problems to solve in a new space,” Seger said. “And so I think if we could solve those, it would just have like a 10x impact on this segment.”