AI tools are getting cheaper and easier to reach every month. Soon the shop down the street will run the same ones you do. So the thing that separates the businesses that pull ahead will not be who owns the best AI. It will be how the owner uses it: to do more, or to think less.
That is the argument David Brooks made in a June 28, 2026 essay in The Atlantic, "The People Who Will Thrive in the AI Age." His point is plain. When intelligence gets cheap, what sets people apart is not how smart they are. It is their appetite for mental effort.
"When intelligence is plentiful, volition is valuable."
We went past the essay and checked the research behind it. Here is what holds up, and what it means for a business in Kingsport, Johnson City, or Bristol.
AI does not lighten the load. It raises the ceiling.
The clearest data comes from ActivTrak, a workplace-analytics company that tracked more than 10,000 workers before and after they started using AI. The workday did not get lighter. It got denser: more email, more chat, more time in business tools, and less deep focus. And that focus drop hit the AI users, not the people who skipped the tools.
How the workday changed after AI adoption
Researchers at UC Berkeley's Haas School of Business watched the same pattern up close over eight months inside one company. People used AI to take back work they used to hand off, and to start tasks in the small gaps of the day. The tool did not free up time so much as it made doing more feel easy.
Here is the fork in the road. That same intensity goes one of two ways. Aimed at growth, it means taking on work you used to turn down. Left ungoverned, it just means a faster, more scattered day. Worth knowing: the most productive workers were not the heaviest users. A light, steady touch beat maximum use.
Most of your competition has not really started
This is the number that matters most locally, and it depends entirely on which survey you read. The U.S. Census Bureau, using a nationally representative survey, finds only about 18 percent of the smallest firms use AI in any business function, and that share has stayed flat. The Federal Reserve, asking whether a small firm or its staff use AI for work at all, finds 43 to 49 percent. Different surveys, different methods. The bottom line holds either way.
Small-business AI adoption depends on which survey you read
Either way, most small firms are experimenting at best, not building AI into how the work actually gets done. And among those that do use it, the Fed found far more evidence of productivity support than labor cutting, with most firms reporting no change in labor costs at all. The gap between casual use and real capacity is wide open. In this region, that gap is your opening.
Early signs the effort pays, and one honest caution
There is real-world signal that leaning in helps the bottom line. The payroll company Gusto studied roughly 7,700 small businesses using its own payroll records and found that firms increasing their AI use tended to see modestly higher revenue in the months that followed. That is one company's data, not the final word, but it is measured results rather than a survey.
The caution is worth stating plainly, because most coverage skips it. In February, MIT economist Daron Acemoglu and two colleagues published a formal model warning that if people lean on AI to skip the thinking, the shared know-how a community runs on can quietly erode over time. The same research points to real pressure on entry-level roles, where junior people used to learn the trade by doing the routine work AI now handles. Put simply: AI rewards the judgment you already have, and it can starve the judgment you have not built yet.
AI does not make you sharp or lazy. It makes you more of whatever you already are.
The takeaway
The AI is not the advantage. Access is about to be everywhere, and most of your local competition has not moved anyway. The advantage is whether you use it to do more of the work that grows your business, or to check out.
Start here. Pick one task this week that you have been putting off or paying someone else to do. Use AI to get a first draft. Then bring your own judgment to finish it, human-reviewed before it goes out the door. That habit, repeated, is the whole game.
Sources: The Atlantic (Brooks, June 28, 2026); ActivTrak 2026 State of the Workplace; Ye and Ranganathan, Harvard Business Review, February 2026; U.S. Census Bureau Business Trends and Outlook Survey, 2026; Federal Reserve Small Business Credit Survey, 2026; Gusto small-business payroll analysis, 2026; Acemoglu, Kong, and Ozdaglar, NBER Working Paper 34910, February 2026.
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