Going out on your own and starting a business can be daunting. Every decision feels heavy. You quickly realize that each role within your company—accountant, marketer, customer service, salesperson—belongs only to you. You have to handle tasks you didn’t even know existed. As your business grows more successful, the tasks keep growing.
Years ago, there was one clear solution: hire more people. Bring on team members to take on the work. But today, solopreneurs are taking a different course of action. Now, according to our research at cloud-based accounting software company Freshbooks, 86% of solopreneurs and micro-business owners will turn to AI before hiring outside help. And it makes sense: it can save time and energy and allow these entrepreneurs to focus on the most important parts of scaling their businesses. At the same time, there are still places where AI usage falls short, and it’s necessary to hire or look for outside support.
AI solves the startup challenges
According to solopreneurs, the biggest area where AI supports them is the initial building phase of creating a business. Ninety percent say that AI made it easier to build and run a business as one person. After all, there are only so many hours in the day, and AI can take some of the more tedious tasks off of a solopreneur’s ever-growing to-do list.
AI can manage scheduling and calendars. It can create first drafts of social posts and marketing materials. It can do the heavy lifting of building a website and creating early business plans. With AI, solopreneurs are finding ways to do it all and build businesses without outside help.
In essence, AI is helping new businesses look and feel bigger and more established than they may be at this point in their journey. And in competitive markets, this can be a game changer for getting clients as a small business. Sixty-four percent of solopreneurs find that looking bigger and more established is table stakes for their business, and more important than simply getting more tasks done, according to our report. By building systems and processes with AI, they can more quickly establish trust and credibility, even in the earliest days.
When to call in outside support
But AI isn’t a solopreneur panacea. AI challenges come when the tasks assigned get increasingly complex. As a solo business grows, the tasks for that entrepreneur will pile up from managing marketing, sales, design, financials, taxes, and more.
AI’s benefits often plateau after the business is off the ground. It’s managing tasks and supporting the business, but it will also require more and more energy from the business owner to keep it supporting the business’s growth. In fact, we found that 65% of these business owners are finding that while the technology improves productivity, the responsibilities of maintaining AI are increasingly leading to “AI burnout.”
When you hire an employee, the hope is that after initial onboarding, they will continue to grow and take on tasks, creatively problem-solving in ways that you may not have even thought. While onboarding and training take time and effort, a dedicated employee brings value and takes tasks off a solopreneur’s plate. With AI, the constant (virtual) hand-holding and the need to check every piece of work can potentially outweigh the benefits of relying on it as your only support system.
Another area where solopreneurs shy away from using AI is with their financials. And understandably so; this is highly sensitive information and requires the utmost care.
Managing money is one of the biggest concerns for business owners, which often leads them to try to take on too many of these tasks on their own. Half of these business owners aren’t using any invoicing or accounting software, and 41% also aren’t using any online payment tools, our data shows.
Whether it’s fear that AI will miss a payment or make an accounting error, or a desire to keep all financials under their own control, financials have risen to the top of the areas where solopreneurs are slower to adopt AI use. This is starting to shift as platforms adopt open standards, like Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, which lets an owner connect their financial data to an AI assistant like Claude while still deciding exactly what it can see and act on. At FreshBooks, we recently rolled out our own MCP Connector for this reason, so a solopreneur can ask a plain-language question about cash flow or an overdue invoice without handing over blanket access to their books.
For a new business, AI is a powerful tool. It can reduce friction, free entrepreneurs from tedious tasks, and help them become proficient in ones that aren’t their forte. This will continue to be beneficial as more entrepreneurs go out on their own, especially if it’s for the first time.
But ultimately, human judgment and support will always create the best results. Finding the balance between using AI and knowing when to turn to outside human help will create successful, discerning businesses that can not only start, but also scale.
