The new front door to your business is an AI that’s never heard of you. Here’s how to change that — and why a small business is better positioned for this moment than the big companies down the road.
By Bobby Koritala, Bodaty
Ask ChatGPT or Perplexity to “recommend a good [your trade] near me,” and watch what happens. For a lot of Naperville businesses, the answer is the same: you don’t come up. Not because you’re not good — because the new front door to your business is a model that has never heard of you.
That’s the quiet shift happening right now. Customers used to start on Google. Increasingly, they start by asking an AI assistant — and they trust the short list it hands back. If you’re not on it, you’re not in the conversation, and you’ll never see the customer you lost.
Here’s the part most “AI for business” advice gets wrong: the answer isn’t another chatbot. A chatbot is something you go visit. What actually moves the needle for a small business is AI working inside how you already operate — quietly, in the background, on the work you do every day.
In practice that lands in three places.
Getting found. Whether you show up when an AI recommends businesses like yours isn’t luck. It comes down to what these models can find and verify about you. Most owners have never checked — and it’s fixable once you know where to look.
Winning the work. The proposal that used to eat your evening can be drafted in minutes. Researching a prospect before a meeting takes two. The follow-up that never got sent now writes itself in your voice. None of this replaces your judgment — it removes the friction between you and the next customer.
Running the back office. Answering routine questions in your tone. Never missing a follow-up. Pulling the numbers off an invoice or a contract instead of retyping them. This is the busywork that keeps owners at their desk until 8 p.m. — and it’s exactly what AI is good at.
The catch — and it’s a real one — is doing this safely. The horror stories you’ve heard (an AI quoting the wrong price, sending something it shouldn’t, inventing a number) are real, and they happen when AI runs unsupervised. The fix isn’t to avoid AI. It’s to keep a human in control: the AI does the work, you approve what matters, and nothing goes out the door you didn’t sign off on. That’s the whole game — leverage without losing the wheel.
And here’s the part that should change how you feel about all this: you’re not behind the big companies on AI — in a lot of ways you’re ahead. They’re spending two years and serious money untangling old systems before AI can even help them. You don’t carry that baggage. You can put AI to work the right way starting now — which is why the window where a five-person shop can outrun a competitor ten times its size is open right now, and won’t stay open forever.
You don’t need a technical background to start. You need to know which moves are worth making, in what order, and where the guardrails go. That’s an evening of clarity, not a degree.
If you want that clarity, I’m hosting a free 70-minute seminar for small-business owners here in Naperville on Tuesday, July 7. We’ll open with a live look at whether AI knows your business exists, walk through the highest-leverage moves, and everyone leaves with a free AI-visibility audit of their own business. It’s built from my new book, AI That Actually Runs Your Business — and it’s free to attend.
And if that leaves you wanting to build this into your business — not just understand it — there’s a next step. On Tuesday, July 22, I’m running the HitLai Institute’s One-Day Intensive AI Workshop: a small, hands-on group that works through five sessions in a single day to wire these tools into your real operations, with you in control the whole way. Everyone in it walks away with a signed copy of the book. It picks up exactly where the seminar leaves off — so July 7 is the place to start.
The businesses that figure this out won’t be the biggest ones. They’ll be the ones who started early, kept control, and let AI carry the busywork while they did the work only they can do.
Reserve a seat at hitlai.net/institute/seminar.
Bobby Koritala is the founder and CEO of Bodaty, the Naperville company behind HitLai, and the author of AI That Actually Runs Your Business. He is an AI patent holder and the former Chief Product Officer of Precisely.