We’re seeing a fascinating paradox: while everyone’s talking about AI’s impact on Big Tech, it’s quietly revolutionizing small businesses. Is this a sign that SMBs are more agile and adaptable than their enterprise counterparts, or is something else at play?
Agility requires not just adopting new technologies, but understanding how they fundamentally reshape your business operations, customer relationships, and even your competitive landscape. It’s about being proactive, not reactive, in the face of rapid change. Verizon’s sixth annual State of Small Business Survey – based on responses from 600 U.S. small and midsize business (SMBs) – reveals that SMBs are quickly emerging as real AI adopters, not just for marketing and chatbots, but for cybersecurity, employee retention, and customer experience (CX). Today, we’re going to talk about the surprising ways that small and midsize businesses are embracing AI, and what larger enterprises can learn from their agility and innovative approaches.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Aparna Khurjekar, Chief Revenue Officer, Business Markets and SaaS at Verizon Business. Aparna, welcome to the show!
About Aparna Khurjekar
Aparna Khurjekar brings more than two decades’ worth of experience in the telecommunications industry. As Chief Revenue Officer, Business Markets and SaaS for Verizon Business, she is responsible for the accelerating growth, revenue, go-to-market and business strategy, and helping to support mid-market wireless and wireline offerings, including Connect. She leads 6000 sales professionals, who guide customers through digitally transformed journeys with innovative managed solutions for total connectivity, communications, and collaboration. She and her Verizon team are focused on helping to accelerate the recovery of businesses throughout America leveraging the company’s portfolio of technologies and connectivity solutions—from 5G, OneTalk, VerizonConnect, Fios and more.
Over the course of her 15-year tenure at Verizon, Aparna has held various leadership roles, most recently having served as SVP and President for Verizon Business Markets, and prior to that Chief Customer Officer for Verizon Consumer Group, which included guiding AI-led business transformations, omni-channel consumer experience and the digital P&l. She also brings extensive product development experience from both her work at Verizon and her previous position at Motorola Mobility, where she served as the Director of Portfolio & Technology Strategy.
She holds an MS in Electrical Engineering from Temple University and a B.S. in Electronics and Telecom from Savitribai Phule Pune University. Aparna Khurjekar on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aparna-khurjekar/
Resources
Verizon Business: https://www.verizon.com/business/ https://www.verizon.com/business/
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Transcript
Greg Kihlstrom (00:34)
While everyone’s talking about AI’s impact on big tech, it’s quietly revolutionizing small businesses. Is this a sign that SMBs are more agile and adaptable than their enterprise counterparts, or is something else at play? Agility requires not just adopting new technologies, but understanding how they fundamentally reshape your business operations, customer relationships, and even your competitive landscape. It’s about being proactive, not reactive, in the face of rapid change.
Verizon’s six annual State of Small Business Survey reveals that SMBs are quickly emerging as real AI adopters, not just for marketing and chat bots, but for cybersecurity, employee retention, and customer experience. Today, we’re going to talk about the surprising ways that small and mid-sized businesses are embracing AI and what larger enterprises can learn from their agility and innovative approaches. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Aparna Khurjekar.
Chief Revenue Officer, Business Markets and SaaS at Verizon Business. Aparna, welcome to the show.
Aparna Khurjekar (01:34)
Thank you, Greg. So excited to be here.
Greg Kihlstrom (01:37)
Yeah, looking forward to talking about this with you. Definitely, you know, AI is definitely top of mind these days for lots of lots of businesses. But I love love this topic here. Before we dive in, though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Verizon Business?
Aparna Khurjekar (01:52)
Yeah, thank you. And thank you for that. So I’m a partner. I’m the chief revenue officer in the Verizon business group. I manage small, medium businesses ranging all the way from one FTE to 1,000. And across the US, we also do a bunch of SaaS solutions that support small, medium businesses alike. And where I started really was in hardcore software development. And I feel like I am a
an accidental salesperson, but it’s a culmination of everything that I have been working on throughout my career, including products, managing the networks in Verizon, strategy, and also customer experience, which was my last role as the chief customer officer for Verizon Consumers. So pretty excited to be here and talk to you about SMB, but I’ve literally adopted SMB as kind of the turf that I’ve been working on and learning and being really
excited about how much we’ve been able to support and being on this journey over the last several years with the SMBs as we see them continue to grow and thrive and adapt to these new technology and innovations.
Greg Kihlstrom (02:59)
Yeah, yeah, I it. Yeah, I can only imagine that your background helped a lot with the ability to sell all those things that you’ve been working on all those years, right? It just informs the your ability to kind of understand the business you case as well, right?
Aparna Khurjekar (03:13)
Yeah, it comes together really well because if you know, finally it starts and ends with the customer. But if you know what works for the customer, what they need, what it is that they are looking for from you, because technology is merely a means for them to be successful in whatever it is that they’re doing. And we work with businesses of all sizes, all tenures, all growth opportunities, different types of.
industries and it’s just fascinating to see how each one of them is uniquely but also jointly adapting these different technologies to finally serve their customer.
Greg Kihlstrom (03:49)
Yeah, yeah. Well, yeah, let’s let’s dive in here. And you know, we’re going to talk about a few things here. But I want to talk maybe a little more broadly about AI adoption and small and mid-sized businesses. So your research, as I mentioned, shows a significant percentage of SMBs already using AI across multiple functions. You know, there’s certainly a lot of talk about it, lots of news stories and lots of industry pubs talking about this stuff. You know, what’s driving this rapid adoption?
especially you know, there an SMB may not have a lot of technical staff and stuff like that, you know, is given the perceived complexity and cost often associated with AI and yet it’s still being rapidly adopt adopted.
Aparna Khurjekar (04:30)
Yeah, it’s really interesting, isn’t it? And we’ve been, as you said, we’ve been doing the survey for six years, but you don’t need a survey to really see what’s happening. When you’re really in tune with that space, you realize that there is a dramatic growth in the adoption of AI. I mean, it’s literally increased from about 14 % of our respondents saying they’ve been using AI in 2023 to close to 40%.
And I would attribute that to a lot of accessibility and familiarity. So there’s just an increased awareness leading to action. The survey shows that AI awareness is driving direct adoption. As business owners are becoming more familiar, they’re able to move from curiosity to implementation.
practicality, accessibility of applications is helping. There are so many of these applications that they use day to day that are starting to leverage AI, social media, written communication, digital assistance. So there’s that practicality as well as the perceived benefits. And SMBs, I will tell you, are the first to adopt anything that will help them do better with their customers, be competitive and stay competitive because they’ve got to, right? Because they’ve got to democratize
what it is that they can find very, very quickly in terms of technology so that they can close that chasm on the amount of resources they can put on something. So the benefits are there. They can see how it is that this can address operational challenges or save costs for them or boost revenue. And last but not the least is the lower barrier to entry.
more user friendly and affordable solutions. In fact, a lot of the AI solutions we’re talking to, agent AI solutions that are out there, are actually addressing SMBs because the larger companies like us, like Verizon, we want bespoke solutions. We’ve got a lot more to do in terms of baggage we bring with data and integration and ops and processes. So that barrier to entry is a lot lower, reducing the traditional complexity and the cost barriers.
that have traditionally, more importantly, deterred small businesses from entering into new technology solutions and frontiers.
Greg Kihlstrom (06:43)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, because to your point, you know, small businesses are not only competing with their direct, you know, other small businesses, they’re also competing with very large companies in many cases. And yeah, any anything, anything any any company can benefit from efficiency gains, but small businesses literally don’t have more people or resources in many cases to throw at some of these problems.
Aparna Khurjekar (06:58)
Thanks.
That’s right.
Greg Kihlstrom (07:08)
What are you mentioned a few but you know what are some of the most common use cases that you’re seeing for AI among among SMBs and you know are there any that particularly stand out?
Aparna Khurjekar (07:18)
Yeah, this is the exciting part. It’s across the board. The top applications, and not surprising, are around marketing and social media, almost 28 % there. Content creation, campaign optimization, all the usual social media engagement and such. Cyber security, and this is a space where we’ve been educating small and medium businesses that they are as, if not more prone, than the larger size businesses. So threat detection, security enhancements.
Greg Kihlstrom (07:29)
Yeah.
Aparna Khurjekar (07:47)
You were also seeing a lot in terms of communications, so written communications, correspondence, business documentation, emails and drafting. And last but not the least, and this I’m sure everyone would agree, was what people had predicted would be the first unlock is a personal assistant, a digital assistant for customer service automation, query handling and things like that. Importantly, a lot of these are starting to get connected together.
Greg Kihlstrom (08:06)
Yeah
Aparna Khurjekar (08:14)
Multiple business functions are simultaneously using data, marketing, customer service. So that’s great because you want those integrated business strategies. You know, there are some interestingly unexpected applications as well in employee management, say. So SMBs are using AI for HR functions like scheduling, performance tracking, workforce optimization. Service automation is a big one.
but it’s kind of unexpected, especially because we didn’t see it coming. A lot of these small businesses want 24 seven customer service automation. So moving beyond the basic chat bots to sophisticated text-based customer support that can handle, know, multi-touch queries across the clock, around the clock. And then, you know, essentially what we’re seeing is there is a lot in terms of the zeal to go try out different things.
The bottom line is treating AI as a practical operational tool rather than an experimental technology is how it is that we are coaching SMBs and focusing on the immediate ROI across these different solutions is great. Verizon, in Verizon we launched this industry first Gen.AI assistance specifically designed for small and medium businesses. And we’re actually showing businesses how they can create specific solutions through it.
And then it’s not just scaling down the enterprise tools. It’s about really adapting and curating it for SMB space. So it’s been really fascinating to see how quickly and how broad those use cases are.
Greg Kihlstrom (09:46)
Yeah, yeah. And so you mentioned a little bit about AI for employee management. And certainly, you know, whether you’re a very large organization or a very small one, there’s a lot of pressure right now, you know, the the do more with less than I don’t. It’s been around for decades, I know. But like, it feels like it’s more and more timely. Your survey highlighted the potential of AI to both offset
head count, you know, increase efficiencies, do more with less, but also to improve employee retention. So, you know, how are SMBs leveraging these seemingly, you know, contradictory goals?
Aparna Khurjekar (10:23)
Yeah, it does seem a little contradictory, right? But it’s really a dual strategy. think the market’s already starting to mature from AIs here to replace to AIs here to augment. And I think that therein lies the unlock rather than replacing employees. It’s about how do you pull out that cognitive load, the larger workloads and more complex tasks? AgentX is helping with kind of tying a bunch of different agents together into an end-to-end autonomous
plan and do something on my behalf, but offload it so that then the businesses can focus on the main productivity levers. There is also the use case around employee experience. AI is helping. A lot of them are very bullish about, nearly half of them, bullish about how AI can save time so that the employees can focus on things that they can be doing better in, creativity, thinking through the next
what’s around the next bend, right, in terms of strategy. And that helps with employee satisfaction and retention. Who doesn’t want to be in that kind of the forefront of leading, cutting edge stuff while the mundane work is being managed by these bots? Many of them are starting to think about revenue generation through efficiency. You have more time now. So how do you use it towards creating better RevGen products and services?
So using AI as a force multiplier or an augmentation strategy rather than a replacement one is working so that folks can be working on more productive and valuable things. I think it’s a virtuous cycle really, Greg. So AI will handle the routine work. Employees focus on the higher value activities. Productivity increases. Business performance improves. And then there’s that job security and satisfaction that comes in right behind it.
That’s how I think that duality works.
Greg Kihlstrom (12:21)
Yeah, I mean, I think in that scenario, really, it, you know, to use your work, you know, it augments the the workers and it elevates the work that they do. Because I mean, who among us hasn’t spent countless hours doing things that we really, a human didn’t really have to do? You know, I’ve spent hours in front of spreadsheets and doing things that yes, you know, I was the one at that time to do it, but I didn’t.
you know, if only you know, we had AI, you know, 10 years ago that was capable of doing some of the things that can do now. You know, the then you know, life would have been different. But you so I do I agree. And I think that that view of augmentation and, really elevating the the level of the work that the the existing employees maybe, maybe it reduces the need to bring on new employees, but it doesn’t necessarily reduce the the headcount.
Aparna Khurjekar (13:10)
Yeah, and also the nature of the employees skill sets is going to change and change very quickly. You can’t deny the fact that you now need people who are a lot more about creating strategic frameworks, being able to solve complex problems that are facing or opportunities that are facing that SMB or any business for that matter, versus individuals who could literally look at data and make sense of it and come up with some insights because AI can do that for you now and give you even prescriptive recommendations.
Greg Kihlstrom (13:37)
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah. So I know we’ll talk a little bit more about the some of the marketing use cases for AI. But another one and maybe a less common one, but still growing is cybersecurity and how AI is is able to help there. And, you know, certainly there’s increasing cyber threats. We read about, you know, stuff all the time and growing, growing amounts of them.
Your survey revealed a growing number of SMBs are utilizing AI for cybersecurity. How do you see AI specifically being used to enhance these SMB security posture? And what are some of the key benefits they’re experiencing?
Aparna Khurjekar (14:24)
Yeah, this is an area I’m really excited about because the amount of education we are attempting to do in the SMB space, given the footprint of data and how widespread it is now, where individuals are connecting from, and we are in the connectivity business, we want to make sure that every endpoint, every connection is secure. And as you rightfully called out, the threats are only increasing, the bad actors are only getting better and better. And this is where AI is helping tremendously.
Greg Kihlstrom (14:36)
Yeah.
Aparna Khurjekar (14:54)
So we’re already seeing a quarter in the survey said that I think about a quarter of SMBs are leveraging AI and these are solutions to boost cybersecurity efforts. Let me give you some examples. So automated threat detection, AI and cybersecurity can help with zero trust initiatives. It can help with continuous monitoring, right? And validation of say IAM, so identity and access management.
So really valuable for SMBs who lack that dedicated team, like you rightfully pointed out. AI can be used for a very deep pattern recognition and anomaly detection, real time. So AI can enable these predictive analysis that helps a team, may not be a security team, maybe an ops team with identifying, analyzing, and neutralizing in many cases cyber threats in real time. And there is this 24-7 nature of it too.
Right? Because data is not open and shut between open at nine and shut at five. It’s open 24 seven for people to come and crouch on and start doing bad things with. So this 24 seven monitoring without additional staff is a huge deal enhancing what you have in terms of detection. And the most important thing is you can do it in a cost effective way. What I like about this is
Greg Kihlstrom (16:14)
Yeah.
Aparna Khurjekar (16:16)
we are democratizing advanced security capabilities. And that is a great deal because small businesses face the same issues. They just don’t have the wherewithal. And SMBs are now able to punch about their weight in cybersecurity, providing proactive defense capabilities that can scale, most importantly, with the businesses. love SMBs growing and moving from small to mid to large.
And that’s where they can be scaling as well.
Greg Kihlstrom (16:42)
Well, yeah. And I mean, when you’re talking about, you know, working with SMBs that are anywhere from one, you know, full time employee on up to a thousand and more. That one person in that company may not be a cybersecurity. They may not be an expert at at many things, you know, there. But even in a company of 20 people, you know, there may not be a cybersecurity expert. So, yeah, I mean, there I know you mentioned a few things, but is is
Aparna Khurjekar (16:58)
Right.
Greg Kihlstrom (17:08)
That seems like one of those differentiators there that a vulnerability you could say even with an SMB is, they just don’t have a dedicated expert. Are there any other kind of unique things to SMBs when it comes to cybersecurity?
Aparna Khurjekar (17:23)
Yeah, I we talked about the resource constraint, lack of dedicated expertise. Insufficient training shows up a lot too. Where do you train? How do you train? A lot of the bad actors will enter through those loopholes or gaps you have. ⁓ And weak access control. just the basic security weakness is what you can be going and working on. And this is where you can have tailored solutions. Now, these can be cost effective, cloud-based solutions.
Greg Kihlstrom (17:30)
Yeah.
Aparna Khurjekar (17:51)
And you could be doing adaptive learning and doing more of the automated detections of stuff. And you don’t require necessarily, as you and I are calling out just now, the security expertise or the 24-7 monitoring. And that’s what excites us and excites me around this.
Greg Kihlstrom (18:10)
Yeah, yeah. So last last topic I want to talk about is going back to the marketing aspect and customer experience. And so, you know, as you mentioned, there’s there are definitely a lot of SMBs using AI based tools for things like social media and other things, you know, including platforms like TikTok and others.
How are these, you know, what are some of the use cases, you know, how are these businesses integrating AI into their social media strategies to drive real business outcomes?
Aparna Khurjekar (18:40)
Yeah, this is a space where I honestly think the small businesses, even the size of one, are out-sizing, out-pacing the larger companies. They are very, very nifty and leveraging everything and more in adapting all the different tactics. Over 28 % of them are leveraging social media and making this like the top AI application. And they’re either already there or considering moving beyond. And here’s where we love the uses of social media. obviously SMBs leverage multiple platforms. And as they’re leveraging those multiple platforms or social media, they need content and that content needs to be optimized for that platform. That’s where you see a lot of the use cases. Audience analysis and targeting and targeting across multiple platforms. SMBs are trying to understand their audience behaviors and patterns and optimizing. Even, you know, I was talking to someone who was talking about their posting times and the content type for maximization and AI is helping them with that. They can have multiple copies and they can post it multiple times and see the response. Also, then the response is one thing doing the marketing, it’s the other allowing for the automated response and customer service.
Majority of them are using it for customer service and extending to social media customer interactions as well. Lots of bots out there doing those interactions. And like I called out, the cross-platform strategy becomes so much easier. The tailoring and the personalization becomes so much easier with that. The one piece I really am also seeing is the personalization of content by audience by individuals because now you’re not limited by that creator who you’re paying by the hour or ⁓ by copy, and you can have multiple ones of them. And that’s working tremendously well. So personalizing at scale from customized communications to intelligent customer service, they’re delivering really enterprise level experiences with personal touch and agility. And that’s really helping.
Greg Kihlstrom (20:28)
Yeah.
Aparna Khurjekar (20:48)
Small medium businesses reach their customers locally and at scale.
Greg Kihlstrom (20:52)
Yeah, yeah. And that’s really exciting because it does it does, you know, it democratizes it levels the playing field like however you want to say it, you know, and I think that’s a really excellent. Yeah, right, right. Definitely. Love it.
Aparna Khurjekar (20:56)
huge. Let’s get an edge.
Because what we’re
seeing is SMBs are not afraid to fail. They have very little to lose because they’re very agile. So they’ll start, they’ll test something and they’ll move to the next thing if it doesn’t work. And then they’re able to improvise. And we’re seeing use cases in AI that you wouldn’t have conjured up even yesterday, today, because they’re like, if you do this and then you help with this, then you put this content together. This is what I’m getting in terms of MROI it’s pretty exciting to see.
Greg Kihlstrom (21:35)
Yeah. And to your point there, the agility there is, you know, you enterprise, there’s lots of good things about enterprise organizations, but like speed of decision-making is not always one of them. And so, you know, you get a small business that’s, know, either it’s a team of one or a team of a few, and you’re able to do that. You’re able to rapidly iterate, improve and, and, and do things that a larger company simply, it would take them weeks to
Aparna Khurjekar (21:52)
Yeah.
Greg Kihlstrom (22:01)
get the approvals and the changes and all that stuff. in that case, it really does give them an edge, Yeah. Great. Well, Aparna, thanks so much for joining today. I’ve got one last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role, and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
Aparna Khurjekar (22:07)
So well said.
Yeah, it’s easy. The SMBs keep me agile. So continuous learning is a core practice for us. We have strong feedback bloops, so constantly talking to small, medium businesses of all size. And I embrace the beginner’s mindset. Even in areas where I may feel like we have deep expertise, I try to approach the new information with curiosity and just without any confirmation bias. Because if there’s one thing we’re learning in today’s day and age, what worked yesterday is not going to work.
And just that way we can make agility habitual and keep collaborating and growing. So we love to collaborate with small medium businesses and keep growing. And really they keep me engaged and keep me agile.
