Don't worry about which AI tool. Worry about this instead

Short answer: unless your business has a genuinely specialist need, it doesn't much matter whether you use ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Julian Tan, Group Director of Corporate Strategy at BT, is direct about this: "It's actually less around what tools you use and more about how you use those tools to solve your business problems." What actually determines whether AI helps your business is whether you've clearly identified the problem you're trying to solve.

The tool question is the wrong question

A lot of small business owners get stuck comparing AI platforms, reading reviews, weighing features, waiting to be sure they've picked the "right" one before they start. Julian, who spends his time thinking about AI adoption across a company the size of BT, thinks this is largely a waste of time.

"Unless you're doing very specialist pieces of work, perhaps you're in healthcare and there's a very specific piece of research on genomes that you need a very specific model for, unless you're in those specific use cases, actually a lot of the tools that are available out there are good enough," he says. "It really doesn't matter whether they use ChatGPT or whether they use Claude or whether they use Gemini."

His reasoning is that the tools are converging: "This space is also moving very, very quickly... the tools are becoming a lot better, they're commoditising to a certain degree, and with the open source models in particular they are catching up very quickly." Whatever gap existed between platforms a couple of years ago is closing. Betting your adoption timeline on finding the perfect tool means waiting for a distinction that's shrinking anyway.

What to worry about instead: the strategic-thinking unlock

If the tool doesn't matter much, what does? Julian's answer is about what AI actually lets a time-poor small business do that it couldn't do before.

"Traditionally SMEs, because they're so time-poor, there's just so much to get on with, there's not a lot of time to really experiment... the ruthless prioritisation of things has meant that in the past, without AI tools, they weren't able to do as much," he says. Most small businesses stay operational because there's no time to step back and think strategically.

His framing for what changes that: "Now you've got a cheap, low-cost, but very highly effective analyst with you who can help you make more informed and sharper decisions to help grow your business and identify, for example, where the white space might be, or how you might go to market in a different way." He goes further: "AI is a real equaliser, it's really democratised knowledge, it's really democratised access."

That's a different pitch to the usual "AI saves you time on admin" framing. It's not about doing the same operational work faster, it's about being able to do a category of thinking (market positioning, competitive analysis, strategic options) that used to require either time you didn't have or an expensive external consultant. It's the same argument, from a different angle, behind why being small is a speed advantage rather than a limitation: the constraint was never really the tool, it was the organisation's capacity to think and act.

What this actually means for you

Stop researching AI tools looking for the "best" one. Pick whichever mainstream platform you or your team already have some familiarity with, and instead spend that decision-making time on something more useful: naming the actual business problem you want help with. Where's the white space in your market? What's the option you haven't properly explored because there was never time to sit down and think it through? Take that question to whichever AI tool you've already got and treat it as a first-pass analyst, not a search engine.

If you're not sure how to frame that problem in the first place, our AI readiness guide walks through a simple three stage model for working out where your business actually stands before you dive in.

What to try this month

Write down one strategic question about your business you've never had time to properly think through: a market gap, a pricing decision, a new service idea, and put it to whichever AI tool you already use. Don't switch platforms first. Just ask the question.

For a structured way to work through bigger strategic questions like this, the AI for Growth community offers free access to the AI Strategy Generator alongside a peer network of other UK small business owners.