Adoption is where lock-in gets installed (OpenAI SMB programme)

The easiest moment to adopt AI is also the moment you decide how hard it will be to leave.

OpenAI has launched a small business programme: training webinars, in-person academies, starter guides, and a set of partner-built skills covering the tools most owners already run on, including Shopify, Intuit, Slack, Dropbox, Atlassian and Wix. The offer is genuinely useful.

OpenAI reports that at its own small business events last year, 78% of participants built a functional workflow in a single day, and 42% went on to save more than five hours a week. Those are the vendor's own figures from its own rooms, and the second is self-reported by people who chose to attend. A working business process can be assembled and connected in an afternoon.

That speed is the whole story. Those partner skills link your commerce platform, your accounts, your file storage and your internal comms to a single assistant, and they do it during onboarding, when the owner is focused on getting something working rather than on what the arrangement looks like in three years. Every connection is a small convenience and a small commitment at once.

This is not a criticism of one provider, because every major platform is building the same ramp. The barrier to adoption was never the model; it was knowing what to do with it, and whoever solves that gets to sit at the centre of a business's operating stack while the skills, the memory and the workflows accumulate there.

The cost of switching is not the subscription. It is the reconstruction: the connectors, the accumulated context, the habits your team has built around one interface. None of that appears on an invoice.

So adopt, because the productivity case for small teams is real. Do it deliberately, keep the workflows that matter documented so they stay portable, and revisit the decision on a schedule rather than when a renewal forces it.

Dependency is rarely chosen. It accumulates, one convenient integration at a time.