M&M Kelly, an AI transformation advisory firm, has expanded its strategic planning services to more directly serve small business leadership teams. The update extends the firm's existing decision-readiness and governance work, originally developed for executive teams, to owners weighing similar questions about structure, authority, and sequencing.
More details can be found at https://mandmkelly.com/
Small business leaders increasingly face AI questions once reserved for large enterprises: who approves new tools, how spending gets justified, and what happens when staff adopts AI informally. In response, M&M Kelly's expanded services give smaller organizations a structured way to address those questions before technology decisions are made.
Adoption of AI among small and midsize businesses has climbed sharply: Intuit QuickBooks' 2026 AI Impact Report found that 77 percent now use AI regularly, up from 48 percent in July 2024. Yet a companion Intuit survey found only 20 percent of owners would trust AI alone with high-stakes calls like cutting costs, versus 37 percent who trust a human expert.
That trust gap mirrors what M&M Kelly sees in its advisory work: owners are comfortable delegating routine tasks to AI but want a person accountable for decisions tied to revenue, staffing, and risk. The firm's expanded strategy planning services are built around that distinction, keeping leadership, not software, in charge of consequential calls.
"Small businesses are being sold AI tools when what they actually need is a decision framework," said Mitch Kelly, founder and principal consultant at M&M Kelly. "The organizations that get value from AI are the ones that decide, in advance, who owns the call and how success gets measured."
Kelly founded the firm after three decades working across military intelligence, federal cybersecurity, academic research, gene therapy, and enterprise software, fields he says shared a common failure point in leadership rather than technology. He holds an advanced degree in bioinformatics from the University of Michigan and has published research in outlets including Nucleic Acids Research and BMC Genomics.
"A ten-person company can't afford to get its first real AI decision wrong the way a much larger company can absorb a mistake and recover," Kelly added. "Extending this work to smaller businesses means applying the same discipline, alignment first, then a sequenced plan, to a leadership team that might be three or four people."
Interested parties can find more information by visiting https://mandmkelly.com/