small business software developers

Abstract: Generative AI is widely framed as democratizing skilled work by lowering the barrier to producing professional output. Drawing on 21 semi-structured interviews with 27 workers across 21 small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in Kenya and Nigeria (July to October 2023), we find that availability alone did not make participation workable. In participants' accounts, drafting was rarely the hard part. The consequential work was making AI-assisted drafts defensible enough to circulate to clients. We identify five intertwined practices through which participants made generative AI workable: using it as draft labour, steering outputs through iterative interaction, switching and comparing across tools, performing release work to make outputs accountable before circulation, and repairing context misfit when outputs failed local requirements. We make two central contributions. First, we specify release work as a distinct, boundary-facing form of accountability labour, evidenced through verification gates, traceability reconstruction when sources fail, and non-delegation boundaries that decide what can ship. Second, we show how localization and representational failures, which we call context misfit, operate in everyday work as a recurring breakdown-and-repair class, including failures of local language, institutional knowledge, and the credible representation of African people and places, and we document the repair repertoire they demanded. Reframing democratization as workable participation, we argue that reported gains were conditional on this accountability and repair labour, and we translate the findings into four design directions for workplace generative AI. We treat Kenya and Nigeria as two situated cases, not as a representative sample of SMBs or the Global South.

Abstract: Large language model (LLM) agents are increasingly evaluated on long-horizon tasks, including autonomously running a business. Existing benchmarks for this setting are almost exclusively English-language, Western in retail context, and single-agent, with the agent observing the business directly. We study how these results transfer to a multi-agent Indic setting. We introduce KiranaBench, a simulated Indian general store in which four roles (manager, cashier, helper, and bookkeeper) are each played by a separate LLM agent. Interactions with customers and suppliers occur in English, Hindi, or Hinglish, and product demand is calibrated to India's national Household Consumption Expenditure Survey. Evaluating four open-weight LLMs, we find that all fall far short of a fixed-rule shopkeeper baseline: the best model earns only one-eighth of the baseline's profit, and two models finish below an unmanaged shop. Performance is also consistently lower for Hindi and Hinglish than for English supplier communication. KiranaBench offers evidence that current LLM agents are not yet reliable for autonomously operating small businesses in India, and provides a testbed for developing agents suited to settings that are long-horizon, collaborative, and multilingual.