When Jackson-based small business owner Kevin Deneen was tapped to help advise the White House on artificial intelligence, he wasn’t sure what to expect.
It was National Small Business Week, so he knew it could turn out to be more of a photo op than anything else, with no real substantive discussion.
But he also feels the stakes for artificial intelligence and small businesses are higher than they’ve ever been. America’s 34 million small businesses today create half of all private sector jobs.
As he sees it, the right regulatory framework can unleash a tidal wave of innovation and productivity, while the wrong framework will do the opposite, holding businesses back and making it difficult for them to remain competitive in a marketplace where the small must find ways of competing with the large to survive.
That made even the slightest chance to talk about the promise of artificial intelligence at the highest levels of American government something he couldn’t pass up.
So, Deneen was there with four other hand-picked small business owners for a visit that turned out to involve high-level AI policy advisors who work for Vice President J.D. Vance. And those advisors were definitely not interested in photo ops.
“We were sitting down around an actual table, talking about our perspectives and hearing theirs,” Deneen said. “These really were substantive meetings with a few photo ops sprinkled in, as opposed to the other way around.”
The policy experts, Deneen learned, are a resource the White House often leans into when it’s developing everything from executive orders to formal responses to proposed legislation in Congress. Being at the meeting helped bring Wyoming’s voice to one of the highest tables in the land.
The Promise Of AI
Deneen is cofounder of a growing small business that’s called Moterra Campervans, which rents luxury camper vans to travelers.
He personally has found artificial intelligence tremendously helpful in expanding and scaling up his business, which is now available in seven states so far, including Wyoming, Montana, Utah, Nevada, California, Washington and Maine.
But as helpful as AI has been, Deneen also sees a daunting road ahead as he works to expand his idea to more states, particularly if there’s no coherent framework for artificial intelligence and digital advertising rules.
“When you have a competing patchwork of laws that are different in every state, it’s incredibly taxing,” he said. “Getting all the sales taxes and the licenses and all of that stuff just right is something we’re really attentive to. But somehow, we always manage to trip up on something that we didn’t quite understand correctly, and it’s oftentimes an expensive mistake.”
The digital realm only adds to the complexity.
“There are people from all over the country and all over the world accessing a site, trying to find information,” he said. “So, when it comes to AI or things like digital advertising and data storage and web e-commerce transactions, it gets harder to maintain compliance, especially for small businesses, when the regulations are different everywhere,” he said.
Some states, too, have an enforcement system that invites members of the public to sue non-compliant businesses, giving them no chance to correct their mistakes before getting hit with a costly lawsuit.
“The experience as a small business owner is you don’t know you’re out of compliance with some pretty esoteric law you don’t encounter much until you get faced with a lawsuit,” he said. “And you can’t say, ‘Oh, sorry you had that experience, we fixed it, try again.’ They take you to court, and you’re basically forced to settle.”
That presents a heavy lift for small businesses trying to expand their model to new states, Deneen said. Moterra is doing well, but it’s not at a place where it could afford large policy divisions with dozens of people parsing all the different rules in all the different places to ensure compliance with everything, everywhere, all at once.
Small Business, Big Ideas
Deneen uses artificial intelligence primarily as a personal assistant and coach, albeit one whose work he knows must be double- and even triple-checked.
It generates proposed email responses, edits photos, brainstorms advertising campaign ideas for him and other things like that.
It’s even helped, on occasion, to prepare items he’s never heard of before, like the “creative brief” a photographer asked him for on a potential photo shoot job Deneen was describing by phone.
A creative brief is a document that outlines the parameters of a photo shoot. It’s intended to prevent misunderstandings. But Deneen had no idea what one even was, or what should go in it.
“My head just kind of exploded, because I’ve never worked as a photographer and I don’t really know what he wants when he says a creative brief,” Deneen said.
Deneen considered forgetting the idea altogether and just taking some shots with his cellphone. But, instead, he decided to try out AI and see if it could make a passable creative brief for him.
He typed a two to three-sentence description of the photo shoot into his artificial intelligence assistant and then asked it to transform that into a creative brief.
“The results are never perfect,” Deneen said. “But I could take that and in five to 10 minutes come up with something I felt confident enough to share with the photographer. It might not have been perfect, but at least it kept the conversation going.”
Kevin Deneen, far left, with other small business at the Eishenhower Building in Washington, D.C., before a forum on artificial intelligence with Trump White House policymakers. (Courtesy Kevin Deneen) 
Kevin Deneen, second from left, poses with other small business owners outside the Eishenhower Building in Washington, D.C., before a forum on artificial intelligence with Trump White House policymakers. (Courtesy Kevin Deneen)
Productivity Gains
Those kinds of experiences have encouraged Deneen enough to lean into artificial intelligence and look at ways to extend its uses into higher and higher levels.
That has him particularly excited about what he believes artificial intelligence can help him achieve.
“As a small business owner, I’m so busy,” he said. “There are so many things I have to do. Get my sales tax filings in, make sure my payroll is going out on time, make sure customers are happy, and then try to plan for the future and expand and do all these things.”
With an AI assistant, though, Deneen now spends less time on some of these more mundane — but necessary — things, and more time on creative endeavors, like how to expand his business to more states so he can scale up his company. AI has helped him with that task, too.
“The research capabilities and the search capabilities of AI are just an incredible accelerant to my ability,” he said. “And it’s another good example of, if I can get comfortable with the high-level research, then it’s just going to accelerate me being able to pick up the phone and call someone in Colorado and say, ‘Hey, here’s what I understand, am I getting this right?’”
There Are Some Perils
Deneen is more excited about AI than concerned at this point, but he is not oblivious to troubling uses of the technology.
Like Elon Musk’s Grok AI obliging requests from some X users to “remove her clothes” in replies to women’s tweets. That was resulting in responses that posted women in scantily clad attire, like a bikini or lingerie, without their consent.
“There are so many scary, deep fake possibilities,” Deneen said. “It’s something I think about as a consumer. I think everybody does. I hardly answer unrecognized numbers now, because I’m just worried about the possibility of somebody recording a 10-second clip of my voice as they pretend to be someone they’re not.”
And those kinds of concerning situations are one reason that he believes a coherent, national policy is beneficial to everyone, not just small businesses.
“We’re not there advocating in any sort of anti-regulatory manner,” he said. “We just want to make sure that, as these regulations are considered, the voice of small businesses and the friction we often uniquely feel as we try to keep up with the demands of growing a business alongside a changing regulatory framework (is heard).
Not A Replacement For People
Job losses are another area where many people are concerned. Particularly with individuals like Bill Gates suggesting AI will eventually replace most jobs that humans now do, including some who are quite highly trained like doctors, lawyers and teachers.
Basketball players, Gates suggested, are safe because nobody wants to watch AI play basketball.
But Deneen is not too worried about doctors and lawyers or anyone else for that matter losing their jobs yet. He believes there will be some disruption, and some folks are bound to feel the rug has been pulled out from under them as the job market shifts. He’s hopeful that training is something that will be forthcoming to help people navigate the changes, and that was among topics discussed with the White House.
“I’m pretty optimistic and convinced, so I’ll say that Bill Gates is wrong,” he said. “It’s not just going to replace everyone. You’re still going to want humans to intervene and interact around certain topics or tasks, to help provide clarity that I just don’t think AI can do.”
Deneen has also already seen the results of companies who tried replacing humans wholesale with AI instead.
Like Klarna, a Swedish fintech company that had announced some months ago that they were firing 700 customer service people in favor of AI handling it all.
“Just recently, in the last couple of weeks, they reversed course,” Deneen said. “They said, ‘You know, as we’ve gone over to AI, mistakes are being made.’ So for me, it’s like a demonstration that it can be a really powerful assistant. It can get through mundane repetitive tasks, but not the more complex things.”
Deneen himself doesn’t foresee any time in even the distant future where his own business would try replacing human customer service with AI.
“It can help us do (customer service) better,” he said. “But there’s no way it can provide real customer service to our customers.”
Embracing Change
Deneen said at the end of the policy focus group, he came away with no particular guarantees or indicators on which direction the White House is leaning on future AI policies, but he found it encouraging overall that the White House’s artificial intelligence policy advisors had taken time to really listen to small businesses like his own.
“They were really listening to our experiences, hearing about the issues that we wanted to discuss, and then asking questions and sharing a bit about what they were hearing,” he said. “And I think that kind of listening, which I got to see firsthand, is exactly what you need to be doing in that role as a policy maker to make informed decisions. As business owners, as consumers, as participants in our democracy, I think that’s what we really want out of these challenging issues.”
Change is the only element Deneen is sure of for the future, and being part of that change is his way of fully embracing what’s ahead. That way, he believes he’ll be in the best possible position to manage the best outcomes for his business.
“If you’re embracing the technology, you’re not going to get it exactly right, but you’re just, from a psychological standpoint, if you’re moving toward something and not away from it, you’re going to have a much healthier kind of relationship to it and be able to address issues as they arise,” he said.
Renée Jean can be reached at renee@cowboystatedaily.com.
