SLMs are being massively underestimated in the SME market
I think SLMs are being massively underestimated in the SME market.
With newer and better frontier models coming out every week, I can't help but think that most business workflows don't require intelligence at the frontier.
They need: extracting data from documents, classifying emails, qualifying leads, updating CRMs, routing support tickets, generating structured outputs.
A Qwen 3 8B or Google Gemma 3 running cheaply can handle an absurd amount of this operational work.
That being said, a question still exists: how?
An SME owner can start using ChatGPT today.
An SME owner cannot wake up tomorrow and deploy Qwen, Gemma, vector databases, RAG pipelines, inference servers, and monitoring infrastructure.
The biggest problem with SLMs today isn't intelligence.
It's accessibility. A product. Something where an SME can sign up, connect their email, CRM, docs, and internal systems, and start getting value in minutes. Also deep integrations.