Can SMEs afford AI?

For large enterprises, artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming a serious business investment. For smaller businesses, the question is rather more uncomfortable: can they afford to participate?

By Kuben Ramsamy, head of sales at HPIFS Africa

AI is moving from an interesting experiment to something that can influence productivity, customer service and competitiveness, yet the hardware required to run increasingly capable applications is becoming more expensive.

For a small business owner watching every rand, buying the technology outright can make AI look less like an opportunity and more like another expense.

The timing could hardly be worse, average PC selling prices are forecast to rise again sharply. The combination of component shortages, global impacts of war, inflation and constrained supply is making business computing more expensive just as organisations are being encouraged to modernise.

That creates a peculiar situation for SMEs, they are expected to become more productive through technology while facing higher costs for the very devices that enable that productivity. Waiting for prices to settle may seem sensible, but it can also mean postponing the benefits of better computing, particularly as AI capabilities increasingly move onto the device itself.

IDC says AI workloads are increasingly shifting towards local computing, making more capable PCs an important part of the emerging AI infrastructure.

The bigger question, therefore, is whether an SME should think about AI hardware as a conventional technology purchase at all. A business does not normally wait until it has accumulated enough cash to pay for every productive asset it uses.

Vehicles, premises and specialist equipment are often financed because the business needs access to the asset before it has generated enough cash to buy it outright. There is little reason why computing should be treated differently.

This matters particularly for smaller organisations because technology can have an immediate impact on their ability to compete with much larger businesses. A professional services company, for example, does not necessarily need a huge AI infrastructure investment.

It may simply need employees equipped with capable devices that can handle increasingly demanding applications efficiently. The barrier is often not whether the business sees the value, but whether it can justify removing a large amount of cash from the business to obtain it.

This is where alternative financing becomes worth considering. HP Integrated Financial Solutions (HPIFS) gives HP customers another route to accessing HP AI enabled technology without waiting until they have sufficient capital to purchase it outright.

Instead of making AI capable devices a once every few years capital decision, businesses can consider a model that spreads the cost and makes technology expenditure more predictable.

AI may ultimately prove to be one of the biggest productivity opportunities SMEs have seen in years. But access should not become the privilege of companies with the deepest pockets. If technology can help a smaller business compete with organisations many times its size, the more interesting question is not whether an SME can afford AI, it’s whether it can afford to wait.

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