Kaitlyn Spinney, founder of Dynamically Done , is diving into using AI in her business as a fractional COO. Many of her clients look to her to build dashboards that let them track their progress toward key metrics in their businesses; AI tools help her with some of the tasks involved. She’s dived into learning more about AI, believing that there is no time like the present to become familiar. “I don’t want to wait until it’s too hard to catch up,” she says.

Spinney, based in Charlotteville, Va., is among a substantial percentage of solopreneurs who are finding that using AI helps them do more on a one-person business’s budget. Eighty-six percent of solopreneurs and microbusiness owners say that when they face a business task they can’t perform on their own, they are turning to AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini before hiring someone to do it, according to “The Era of the Solopreneur,” a new report released today by FreshBooks, a provider of accounting and invoicing software. FreshBooks surveyed 500 owners of one-person businesses and microbusinesses from June 22 to July 1, 2026.

Marketing, design and customer service are key areas where these entrepreneurs said they are using AI, the survey found.

“Solopreneurs can now leverage tools to get market signal and product-market fit even faster, before they have to go out and take a risk on hiring someone and putting additional capital into the business,” said Faye Pang, chief revenue officer at FreshBooks, in a interview yesterday. “It’s a really positive trend to know that they’re embracing the technology and using it to drive early signs of product-market fit.”

Ninety-nine percent of respondents using AI said it has expanded their capabilities, helping them accomplish business or client objectives they didn’t find achievable otherwise. Many found the biggest boost is that they can punch above their weight, achieving more capacity than a one-person business would be capable of otherwise.

“I’m a vocal proponent of using AI, as long as it supports human judgment instead of replacing it,” said Won Yu, a designer who participated in a FreshBooks Small Talk: Atlanta event., in a statement. “My whole position is that AI is another tool, and one of its greatest strengths is its ability to take the repetitive work out of your life. I’ve incorporated AI into every aspect of my business from summarizing meeting notes, creating proposals, drafting emails, transcribing research notes, gathering competitive analysis, the list goes on and on. For a small business owner like myself, the value isn’t one major task. It’s removing dozens of tiny [pieces of ] administrative work scattered throughout the week. I use tools like Claude, OpenAI, Gemini to help build decks and designs based on my brand guidelines.”

When asked which capability would matter more to their business success in the future, 64% of respondents pointed to the ability to appear bigger or having greater capability than their actual size, while 36% who chose getting more done without adding time, employees, or costs.

“If you look at the tasks that they’re using AI for—the marketing piece, design, customer service—being able to offer customer support beyond the hours that just a one-person team might be working—those, to me, suggest a front-office customer-experience, net-new customer acquisition, and new-business-development approach of coming across as bigger,” said Pang.

Some respondents expressed fear that competitors may be using AI more effectively. Yet many haven’t yet begun using AI in areas where they might benefit. For instance, they reported spending an average of 10 hours a week on administrative work such as invoicing, bookkeeping and tracking expenses.

Won You, the designer, said he had saved time by using AI for financial tasks. “Effectively, it sits at the epicenter of the operating system of my business,” he said. “On finances specifically, I’d put AI on the parts that are pure repetition and pattern recognition: auto-categorizing expenses, drafting the payment reminder in my voice so chasing an invoice takes 10 seconds instead of laboring over the right wording in an email, cash-flow forecasting that warns me things might get tight in the next 30 days, profitability analysis that catches a project quietly slipping.”

At the same time, some respondents in the survey said AI is creating more work for them on the administrative side, leading to some challenges. For instance, checking the work of the AI is leading to “AI burnout” for 65%.

“There’s a real or perceived ceiling on how much efficacy and efficiency they might be able to get from these before they need to put additional effort in, either to check the work, build a more scalable system, and/or actually bring on folks to help deliver some of the work and not just rely on AI,” said Pang. Ultimately, it seems there is no substitute for human judgment, at least for now.