The Canadian company helping small businesses save time with AI

A pivot to help time-starved entrepreneurs

Vendasta has spent the past few years embedding AI into the everyday tasks that consume business owners' time—from answering emails to managing online reviews.

"It's always been about democratizing technology," says Brendan King, Vendasta's co-founder and CEO. "We want to make AI easy, accessible and affordable for small businesses."

But it wasn’t always about AI. Vendasta has reinvented itself several times over its 17-year history while retaining its core vision of empowering local businesses.

Founded in 2008, the company originally set out to help home-service providers establish their first online footprint, building early tools to manage listings, customer reviews and social media content.

Before long, King and his co-founders discovered that selling software directly to thousands of small businesses was difficult.

So they partnered with larger organizations—like digital marketing agencies—that already served those smaller businesses and could offer Vendasta's software under their own brands.

In 2013, BDC became one of the company’s first investors. Vendasta evolved into a broader platform designed to help businesses attract, engage and retain customers. As demand grew, so did the platform, expanding to include:

• customer relationship management (CRM)
• communications
• billing
• appointment scheduling
• marketing automation
• a marketplace of digital services

When generative AI came along in 2022, King knew it was time for another pivot.

"We have all this data. We have all these tools," he recalls thinking. "We can help AI do the work on behalf of small businesses that are time-starved and don't have the ability to do all these things."

Freeing owners to focus on customers

Today, Vendasta uses AI to help businesses automate many of the routine administrative tasks involved in attracting and serving customers. It has 600 employees across three offices and serves thousands of clients around the world through channel partners.  

The company’s renewed focus is based on King’s awareness that for many small business owners, the biggest challenge isn't a lack of ideas—it's lack of time. 

A restaurant owner can't respond to phone calls during the dinner rush. And a retail business may struggle to constantly update social media channels. 

Vendasta aims to automate as much of that work as possible. 

Its AI-powered tools can answer questions on a company's website, respond to customer inquiries, book appointments, send follow-up messages and help with marketing activities.  

King emphasizes that it's usually not the flashiest AI that can help companies. It's the AI nobody notices in the background. 

"The idea is to give the business owner more time for human interactions with customers by taking care of all the other stuff," says King. This frees up owners to focus on activities that require judgment, creativity and relationships. 

Learning to trust AI

King says the biggest barrier to AI adoption for most small businesses is trust. What if the AI gets it wrong?

But he compares AI adoption to hiring a new employee. You don't expect someone to understand your business on the first day. You train them, monitor their work and give them more responsibility as they succeed.

AI, he says, follows much the same path. You introduce it to a task, provide feedback, and expect it to learn the job.

Lowering the barriers to AI use

AI works best when it has access to good data, but in many small businesses, information is scattered across different systems and hard to share. Vendasta’s platform can gather and organize information from multiple sources to help customers.  

Owners don’t need to build an AI-ready data infrastructure. The platform does the heavy lifting.  

The company also focuses on affordability. 

Vendasta's customers range from enterprise media organizations and software vendors to regional franchises and sole proprietors. But across every tier, the core focus is the same: delivering simple, affordable technology to the small-business end user. 

"Most other providers are still focusing on large businesses," says King. "Our aim is to make it affordable."  

AI that works behind the scenes

Take Vendasta’s work with Italiaonline, Italy’s largest internet company. This partnership shows what Vendasta’s technology can look like at scale. Their co-developed AI assistant, "MARiO," is now available to more than 100,000 Italian small businesses.  

Working around the clock in multiple languages, MARiO handles incoming calls, WhatsApp messages and web chats, booking appointments directly into customer databases and eliminating the old-fashioned phone tree entirely.  

King believes the same principle applies whether a company serves hundreds of thousands of customers or employs a single electrician: it’s not about replacing people. It's about clearing away the routine work that keeps them from doing what only people can do well. 

Getting started with AI

King's advice about where to begin with AI, if you’re unsure, is surprisingly simple: Experiment.

"Just give it a try," he says. "Get familiar with it so you're not scared of it."

He also encourages owners not to assume that today's limitations will exist tomorrow. AI capabilities are advancing rapidly. The best way to understand what's possible is to begin using the technology in low-risk, everyday situations and expand as your confidence grows.

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