Artificial intelligence is already a huge business for Wall Street. But how is it playing on Main Street?
Goldman Sachs, as part of a philanthropic effort, is spending big in an attempt to help ensure smaller employers get in on it. The bank announced Thursday that it has launched the Small Business AI Institute as part of a $500 million expansion of its 10,000 Small Businesses, a program geared toward educating and supporting entrepreneurs. It said it would partner with Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta to provide AI training and tools to entrepreneurs.
“You’ve got to embrace new technology always, because if you’re not embracing it, trying to figure out how it can make your businesses better, there’s a real chance that you can fall behind,” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon said in an exclusive interview for NBC News’ Business in America series.
It’s a pivotal moment for the AI wave and its financial backers, including Goldman. The technology is broadly available to consumers, and U.S. economic growth increasingly depends on the buildup of data centers.
“We believe AI will create the greatest boom in entrepreneurship and small businesses that the world has ever seen,” Sam Altman, CEO and co-founder of OpenAI, said in an announcement from Goldman Sachs. “This is an incredible moment for anyone with an idea for a new endeavor because the gap between imagining it and bringing it to life is getting much smaller.”
Yet the growth that AI is already driving has also helped push up prices for inflation-weary Americans. Anger at data centers is a rare point of bipartisan agreement among voters, and the midterm elections are days away.
In the finance world, critics say AI is an investment bubble that could burst and potentially wipe out companies and jobs. Cracks are forming in the AI trade in markets after Big Tech firms drove much of stocks’ recent surge to record highs.
Goldman Sachs, like much of Wall Street, is in the thick of it all.
The bank’s share price has approximately tripled over the past three years while AI-related companies pushed the stock market to record highs. Goldman helped lead the much-ballyhooed, record-breaking initial public offering for Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which counts xAI and Grok among its core businesses. Goldman is also reportedly working on the IPO of Anthropic, the startup behind the AI chatbot Claude.
“There is going to be a lot of financing to do,” Solomon said last week on an earnings call, “and we’re going to be in the middle of that.”
Goldman and other big firms are counting on small businesses, which make up more than 90% of all U.S. companies and drive most of America’s job growth, to buy in. It won’t be easy getting everyone on board, though.
A recent NBC News poll found that 79% of respondents believe the government isn’t doing enough to regulate AI use. Sixty-seven percent disapprove of how President Donald Trump is handling the technology. Trump has said he favors lax AI regulation from the government.
Meanwhile, some small businesses that already embraced AI have faced backlash from the public, including restaurants that used AI-generated images of food that critics denounced as “slop.”
Still, according to Goldman, entrepreneurs are adopting the technology at a fast clip. A survey this year of more than 2,400 graduates of the company’s small business program found that 86% of respondents were using AI in their businesses, up from just 56% in 2024.
Rechelle Balanzat, founder of the laundry services app Juliette and an alumna of the 10,000 Small Businesses program, told NBC News she sees AI as a tool to help her gin up more business with limited resources.
“I really treat my AI as my consigliere,” Balanzat said. “They are not there to replace your accountant and lawyer. They are not there to replace humans. However, it does help prep me to have much more meaningful questions when I am meeting with my accountant and with my lawyer.”
Despite the widespread use of AI among the Goldman program alumni, just 15% of them said they had fully integrated AI into their core operations, according to Goldman.
Mike DiMarino, who heads Linda Tool in Brooklyn, New York, was part of the inaugural class of Goldman’s program in 2010. The company makes precision machine components for the military and aerospace industries, and DiMarino thinks AI can help with planning, management and processes.
“I’m sure there’s a lot more it can do that I don’t know yet,” he said.
But DiMarino is also cautious about how Linda Tool uses the technology, especially given how much sensitive information the company handles for its work in defense, aerospace and manufacturing.
His concerns mirror broader cybersecurity fears about AI. In July, a swarm of about 700 AI agents created by OpenAI hacked into the open-source platform Hugging Face. Last month, Google said Chinese hackers are using AI to automate their attacks.
In addition to the security risks, company leaders are also increasingly raising concerns about the cost of AI, especially relative to its concrete impact on the bottom line. After spending on AI tokens exploded in the past year, companies from Uber to Microsoft to Meta have all taken steps to limit or re-evaluate how their employees use AI compute power.
Americans are also concerned about what AI will do to the job market. A recent Gallup Poll found that a growing number of workers are worried that technology will make their jobs obsolete. Small businesses employ fewer people than large firms, which makes their workforces especially vulnerable to potential losses.
Balanzat and DiMarino told NBC News they want to use AI to support employees at their businesses, not replace them.
“Machines are expensive,” DiMarino said. “People are priceless.”