Six million small businesses will change hands over the next decade as baby boomers retire, representing up to $5 trillion in enterprise value, according to a McKinsey analysis published earlier this year . The problem: more than half of those owners have no exit plan, and the infrastructure to help them sell has historically been reserved for deals ten times their size, says Eric Salazar.

He thinks artificial intelligence can close that gap.

Salazar is the co-founder and CEO of Iconic , an AI-enabled mergers and acquisitions advisory firm launched in 2024 that targets small businesses under $20 million in revenue. The company's premise is that the same technology transforming dealmaking on Wall Street can now be deployed for the owner of a regional plumbing company or a family-run restaurant group.

"Iconic is giving Main Street business owners a Wall Street experience," Salazar says.

A Market Without Infrastructure

The scale of the coming transition is massive. More than half of all small business owners in the United States are now over the age of 55 , up from roughly 30 percent in 2002, according to Project Equity. Small businesses collectively account for approximately 43 percent of U.S. GDP and employ 62 million Americans. Yet fewer than a third of owners have a documented succession plan , and 27 percent of those over 55 say they plan to simply close their business when they step back, according to a 2025 Gallup survey.

The consequences extend beyond individual owners. When a business closes rather than transfers, employees lose jobs, communities lose anchor institutions, and the economic value an owner spent decades building disappears.

The advisory infrastructure to prevent this outcome is largely absent at the small business level. When large companies change hands, investment banks deploy teams of analysts to value the business, prepare documentation, and manage the process end to end. That apparatus does not exist for most Main Street transactions.

"Messy books, well-intentioned brokers, but zero of the modern tooling you would expect from an investment bank," Salazar says of the typical small business sale. The average deal takes nine to twelve months to close, and many fall apart because financial records are too disorganized for buyers to evaluate, he explains.

Iconic uses artificial intelligence across several stages of the transaction process: organizing and standardizing financial data uploaded by sellers, matching sellers to prospective buyers from a proprietary database, generating deal documentation, and handling administrative work that traditionally consumed large portions of an advisor's time. Salazar says those efficiencies cut the typical transaction timeline roughly in half.

The approach mirrors a broader shift in the M&A industry. According to a 2026 PwC analysis, 45 percent of deal executives are now deploying AI in their M&A processes , double the rate of the prior year. AI is estimated to reduce due diligence time by 30 to 50 percent across the industry.

Salazar is quick to emphasize that automation is not the point. The goal is to redirect human advisors toward the parts of a deal that require judgment and trust.

"A business owner who is sixty or seventy years old and spent decades building their business is not going to hand their life’s work over to be sold by AI," he adds. "The human element is extremely important."

Iconic’s model keeps licensed advisors, many of whom claim to have decades of M&A experience, involved in each transaction. The technology handles what Salazar calls the grunt work so advisors can focus on negotiation, relationship management, and guiding owners through what he says, could be “the largest financial decision of their lives.”

The buyer side of these transactions is also shifting. Salazar says Iconic is seeing increased interest from people who are not the typical profile of a business acquirer: tradespeople, mid-career professionals leaving corporate jobs, and workers who have grown skeptical of employment stability in an era of AI-driven layoffs.

"For a lot of Americans, buying a business now feels less risky than depending on a corporate paycheck that could disappear tomorrow," he says.

That dynamic is creating a new class of buyer drawn to existing businesses with established cash flow, rather than the higher-risk path of starting from scratch. Salazar sees this as an opportunity: sellers who want to retire and buyers who want economic stability are converging on the same market at the same time.

Salazar identified three preparation failures he sees repeatedly among sellers.

The first is financial records. "Most deals fall apart because the financials are a mess. The seller cannot tell their story clearly." He recommends owners prioritize clean bookkeeping from day one, whether through AI-powered tools or a CPA, calling it the single factor that puts a seller ahead of 90 percent of the market.

The second is documentation. A business that depends on the owner's personal knowledge and relationships is worth less than one built on repeatable, documented processes. Standard operating procedures and workflow documentation directly affect what a buyer will pay.

The third is valuation timing. Salazar recommends owners get a formal valuation years before any planned sale, not at the moment they decide to exit. The gap between what an owner hopes to receive and what the market will bear is one of the most common sources of failed transactions, and closing that gap takes time, he explains.

Iconic raised venture capital to build its technology stack, which Salazar says is entirely proprietary. The firm competes against traditional business brokers on one end and tech-enabled platforms that lack dedicated advisory services on the other.

The company's focus on businesses under $20 million in revenue is deliberate, though Salazar says the same platform is capable of handling larger deals and that the firm is already beginning to compete with boutique investment banks for transactions above that threshold.

The stakes, Salazar argues, go beyond any individual deal. "It is not just the business owner’s story," he argues. "There are employees. There are communities. It really is a bigger story."

Whether AI can deliver on that promise at scale is still an open question. The technology is new, the market is fragmented, and the habits of a historically low-tech industry are difficult to change quickly. But with 10,000 baby boomers reportedly retiring every day and millions of businesses approaching a transition point, the window to get it right is narrow.