Solopreneur AI Hiring Is Now the Default, Survey Says

If you run a side hustle, your next employee probably will not have a name, a desk, or a paycheck. According to FreshBooks, solopreneur AI hiring has become the default move for one-person businesses: when owners hit a task they cannot handle on their own, eighty-six percent of them try an AI tool before hiring a human being. The finding comes from "The Era of the Solopreneur," a report released September 15, reported by GlobeNewswire, and based on a Wakefield Research survey of five hundred solopreneurs and microbusiness owners conducted in June and early July.

AI is becoming a new source of business capacity

The headline number is striking, but the change behind it is bigger than any one stat. Shaheen Javadizadeh, the chief executive of FreshBooks, said in the release that the question for a solopreneur is no longer whether a tool saves an hour. Increasingly, he said, owners ask whether it can take on a client, solve a problem, or deliver a level of service that previously would have required another person. That is the real logic of solopreneur AI hiring. AI has stopped being just a productivity aid and turned into a stand-in for headcount. Nine in ten respondents said AI makes it easier for one person to start and run a business, and 98% of AI users said the technology helped them accomplish business or client objectives they otherwise could not have reached.

Owners care about appearances more than you might expect. The survey asked which capability would matter more to future success: the ability to look bigger or more capable than their actual size, or the ability to get more done without adding time, employees, or costs. Sixty-four percent picked looking bigger. Thirty-six percent picked getting more done. Read that as a marketing lesson. For solopreneur AI hiring, presentation is part of the product. A one-person operation that ships agency-quality marketing and answers customers at midnight reads a lot bigger than it is.

The most common uses are the visible ones

Marketing and design come first, customer service second, and administrative functions like financial management trail behind. That ranking is a little strange, because cash flow is still the single most commonly cited business concern among these owners. Fifty-seven percent said they still spend more than ten hours every week on admin work: invoicing, bookkeeping, expense tracking, and taxes. The tools that make them look bigger have arrived before the tools that keep their books clean. It is another quiet milestone in solopreneur AI hiring: the storefront is automated before the back office.

Faye Pang, the chief revenue officer at FreshBooks, said in the release that owners reach for AI first in the visible parts of running a business. How they market themselves, how they talk to customers, how they deliver the work itself. She added that many still spend a significant chunk of their week on the financial administration behind the scenes. The next opening, in her view, is applying AI where it removes real operational and financial friction without stripping out the human judgment a business owner still needs. For anyone freelancing or stacking side hustles, that points at which skills keep their value: judgment, client trust, and the financial literacy no chatbot has figured out yet.

More AI does not always mean less work

There is a contradiction in the report that will feel familiar to anyone who uses these tools daily. Sixty-five percent of owners said that even though AI has improved their productivity, the responsibilities around it, reviewing what it produces and checking it for accuracy, create a risk of what the survey calls "AI burnout." The assistant gives the hours back and then takes some of them as an editing fee.

Then there is the anxiety that has nothing to do with the tools failing. Among the owners who expressed any concerns about using AI at all, the leading fear was that their competitors might be using it more effectively. So solopreneur AI hiring gives a solo founder real reach, and it also manufactures a new kind of overhead and a new kind of worry. The freelancers who pull ahead will be the ones who learn to audit AI output fast instead of treating it as finished work. That pattern is already showing up across the economy: Copilot cognitive work is now half of how people use AI, independent workers are finding new income around the tools, from AI side hustles doubling reported income to low-cost daily hustles that stack small wins.

The practical takeaway is narrower than the hype suggests. A generation of business owners now hires AI before hiring people, and the ones doing it on purpose are gaining ground on the ones doing it out of habit. That is the lasting shape of solopreneur AI hiring. Solopreneur AI hiring does not end with a one-person business forever. It just changes the answer to the oldest small-business question there is: who does the work.