There's a version of the AI conversation happening at the Fortune 500 level that feels very far from the reality of running a small business.
You're trying to get through invoices, follow up with a potential client, and figure out whether you actually need a newsletter. Meanwhile, someone on a panel is talking about "orchestrating complex systems at scale."
Before you roll your eyes, maybe keep an open mind: some of the most useful ideas in that conversation are closer to your work than you'd think. You just have to know how to translate them.
Three women who are currently helping shape how AI develops have said something worth exploring. Not because they're gurus. Not because you should do what they do. But because the patterns they're describing show up in ordinary business problems — the kind you're probably dealing with this week.
Mira Murati: AI That Works With Human Judgment
Mira Murati left OpenAI in 2024 and founded Thinking Machines Lab in 2025. The throughline in her work — and in what she's said publicly about the direction she's building toward — is AI that augments human reasoning rather than replacing it.
This matters for your business in a very specific way.
Right now, about 68% of tax and accounting professionals say they're hopeful about what AI can do for their field, per the Thomson Reuters 2025 Generative AI in Professional Services Report. But the ones who've figured out how to use it well aren't using it to make final decisions. They're using it to surface what needs a decision. Flagging an expense that doesn't categorize cleanly. Drafting a client summary that a human then reads and adjusts.
For a small business owner handling her own books, this is the right framing. You're not handing anything over. You're using AI to do the first pass — the categorizing, the organizing, the first draft of the thing — and then you're applying your judgment to it. Businesses using AI in accounting this way report recovering an average of 5.4 hours per week, according to Beancount.io, citing the Intuit QuickBooks Small Business Insights Survey.
That's not magic. That's just a regular Tuesday for most of us. It's also one of Quinta & Co.'s fall classes and will be open for registration soon.
The practical starting point isn't an AI accounting platform. It's using what you already have — a spreadsheet, a note, a recurring expense — and asking an AI tool to help you make sense of it. Try it for a week and see what you actually trust.
Fei-Fei Li: The Spatial Intelligence of Who Your Customer Is
Fei-Fei Li, one of the founding figures of modern AI research and now co-founder of World Labs, has spent years thinking about how AI learns to understand context — not just words, but the spatial and relational structure of the world those words describe.
You don't need to know anything about spatial intelligence to apply this idea.
What it points to, for a small business owner, is the question of fit. Not just who your customer is, but when they're ready to buy, what their situation is, and what they're actually trying to solve. AI tools can now help you think through this in ways that weren't possible a few years ago — analyzing patterns in who converts, who doesn't, and what the difference looks like.
For client acquisition specifically, this is where things get interesting. According to the State of Lead Gen Report 2025, cited by DesignRush, 45% of business leaders now identify AI as the most transformative force in how they find new clients over the next three years. The tools that are doing this well aren't blasting cold outreach at everyone. They're helping small operators get more precise — right fit, right message, right moment.
For a small business, this doesn't mean a complex CRM with AI lead scoring on day one. It might mean spending twenty minutes with an AI tool walking through your last five clients — who they were, what they needed, where they found you — and letting the conversation surface a pattern you hadn't named yet.
That's a practice, not a software purchase.
If you want to work through something like that in a structured way, open studio is a good place to start. Bring a real client situation and we'll work with it together.
Eléonore Crespo: Operational Intelligence Is the New Edge
Eléonore Crespo, co-CEO of Pigment (a financial planning platform), made a prediction in Fortune's MPW 2026 roundup that's worth repeating: as AI takes over routine tasks, the ability to orchestrate systems and drive speed becomes the most valuable leadership skill — and that's historically where women in business have been most skilled. We multi-task in our sleep!
What she's describing, from a small business perspective, is this: the people who will use AI best are the ones who are already good at keeping things moving. Not the ones with the biggest tech stack. The ones who know their operations well enough to know which part of the week eats the most time for the least return.
Brand awareness is a good example. It's not that small businesses can't produce good content — it's that producing it consistently is genuinely hard when you're also running everything else. Per Salesforce's 2026 guide on AI tools for small teams, combining a writing tool for brand-consistent content with a design tool like Canva creates what used to require a part-time marketing hire. The Nuacom 2026 small business guide found that businesses integrating AI strategically — meaning one area at a time, not all at once — report 20 to 40 percent productivity improvements.
The key word is strategically. Crespo isn't saying automate everything. She's saying: know your operations well enough to know what AI can take off your plate without compromising the relationships and judgment that are actually your advantage.
Customer service is another version of this. A chatbot that answers basic questions on Instagram or your website at 10 p.m. doesn't replace how you show up for your clients. It just means fewer things fall through the cracks on Tuesday morning.
The Pattern Across All Three
Murati, Li, and Crespo are building in very different directions. But there's something consistent in how each of them talks about what AI should do.
It should make human judgment more available, not less.
It should help you understand your situation with more precision.
It should take the weight of repetition off so you can show up for the work that actually requires you.
Per the Cherie Blair Foundation's 2026 AI research, AI adoption among women entrepreneurs more than doubled in one year. But the same report found that only about a third of frequent users are applying it in operations and finance — the places where it would actually recover time.
The JPMorgan Chase Institute noted that while women-owned businesses are closing the AI adoption gap, structural barriers remain. And per the Reimagine Main Street / PayPal survey, women report a greater need for support and training — but are half as likely to be directly marketed to by tech providers.
That's the gap Quinta & Co. exists to close.
Not with hype. Not with a fifteen-tool stack. But with a real practice — one task at a time, one week at a time, with honest feedback about what worked and what didn't.
The next module in The Practice opens soon. If something in this post landed, that's probably the right place to keep going.
Come find us.