LinkedIn's UK boss: Why being small is suddenly a genuine AI advantage

Overall hiring on LinkedIn is down 24 per cent versus pre-pandemic levels, but Britain's smallest businesses are moving in the opposite direction. Hiring at firms with 10 employees or fewer is up 44 per cent since 2019, and the number of UK LinkedIn members calling themselves a "founder" has jumped 69 per cent in a year.

In this column, Janine Chamberlin, head of LinkedIn UK, uses the platform's own data to explain what's driving that shift and why AI is playing a very different role for a five-person business than it is for a FTSE 100 one.

Artificial intelligence has made starting a business less daunting. Over the last couple of years, I have seen solo founders go from “absolutely no way” on AI to having contracts, marketing and admin handled by tools that not so long ago, they barely knew existed. For many of the people starting businesses today, AI is not a change to be managed –, it is what made starting a business feel possible.

The generational numbers are striking. Among UK Gen Z entrepreneurs, around 80 per cent say AI or digital tools were important in enabling them to start or run their business. They are also 10 times more likely than their baby boomer counterparts to say AI gave them the confidence to make the leap. For this generation of business leaders, AI is simply part of the infrastructure. This is already showing up in the jobs market, where the most resilient roles combine AI capability with human judgement.

Not every founder is sold on AI

This offers a huge opportunity, but let's be honest, not everyone wants to be a founder, and not every small business owner is turning to AI. I, for one, wouldn't be interested in repeating what I have watched my parents do: building and running a cleaning company, with all the ups and downs, the late nights and the disrupted holidays. I know that for many small businesses, their daily reality has not changed.

The plumber, the family retailer, the small manufacturer, they are not actively resisting AI. They are heads-down, time-poor and margin-constrained, focused on running their business. While the growth numbers for AI tools are astonishing, it is still a relatively small part of the population having this conversation. For a business running on thin margins, even 50 quid a month is a lot for technology that needs an investment of time and effort to pay off.

But it is increasingly worth it. AI needs to be seen as a force multiplier, and the smaller you are, the easier it is to make it one. Half of C-suite leaders at large organisations now cite uncertainty about AI's impact on future roles and skills as one of their biggest challenges. They are making difficult workforce decisions inside organisations where adopting new technology requires legal, IT, HR and change management to move in sync. A business of five people can try something on Monday and roll it out by Thursday. That ability to test, learn and move on is a real commercial edge over bigger enterprises.

The leadership challenge AI can't solve

All this is a cause for hope, but it also poses a new kind of leadership challenge, and it's one that no AI tool can solve for you. Making the most of this advantage asks a different question of leaders. Most founders I have observed who start out alone, then need to bring others in, are not naturally set up to lead a team.

They work from the assumption that everyone else will care about the business the way they do. But they almost never will, and not because they are wrong or because they're unprofessional. The founder's intensity is genuinely difficult to replicate, and AI will not solve that.

As one founder of a major British energy company put it to me recently: businesses grow when leaders find genuine ways to share the upside, financially, culturally and practically. You cannot make people care by writing it into a job description. You have to build the cultural conditions for it.

And you cannot build those conditions on your own. The biggest loss for any small-business owner is working by yourself, for yourself, with yourself, even with two or three people in the room. The best founders I have encountered keep their heads up. They learn from peers in similar positions, pay attention to what other businesses in their sector are doing, and look for ideas well beyond it. That kind of connectedness is what stops the daily grind of running the business from becoming its limiting factor.

The shopkeepers of Britain's past built businesses through hard work and commercial instinct. The founders emerging today have those same qualities, plus new tools their predecessors could never have imagined. If our nation of founders is to turn into a nation of growing businesses, the decisive factor will not be technological. It will come down to two things which AI cannot give you: the ability to make other people care as much as you do, and the willingness to look up at the world around you. That is what leadership has always been.