Some Small Business Owners Believe AI is Enabling "Do It Yourself" Alternatives That Cost Them Revenue

Small business owners believe AI is costing them business, and though that perception might be anecdotal and perhaps incorrect, it is what many believe. On the other hand, the potential sources of product substitution and the ability to “do it yourself” seem clear enough. 

As helpful as generative artificial intelligence might be for tasks (get an answer), it is far more useful when the output changes to “outcomes.” 

Last year, we might have used a language model to write a paragraph or conduct a search. Increasingly,  we will tell an agent the desired outcome (such as "launch a localized marketing campaign for Japan") and the agent will execute the tasks autonomously.

In fact, the term “do it yourself” will acquire new meaning, as the “doing” often is done by the model, while the user simply specifies what is to be done.

So in a growing number of cases, the marginal cost of "expert labor" is approaching zero. For a $20 per month subscription, a user has the equivalent of a virtual legal team, a design studio, and a coding assistant.

Existing Service/Product	AI Substitution (2026)	DIY Value Proposition
Boutique Creative Agency	Multimodal Generative Agents	8K video, brand identities, ad copy.
Tax, Accounting Services	Autonomous Financial Agents	Real-time tracking of expenses and automated filing.
Junior Legal Counsel	Contract. Compliance LLMs	Drafting, risk analysis of complex legal documents.
Custom Software Dev Shops	No-Code Agent Orchestrators	"Describe" an app; AI writes the code, deploys.
Travel Agencies,  Concierge	Hyper-Personalized AI Concierge	Agents book flights, hotels, and dinners..
Language Tutors, Translators	Real-time Neural Translation	Translation in any context.
Market Research Firms	Synthetic Audience Simulation	AI replaces surveys.