Commentaries at the San Antonio Report provide space for our community to share perspectives and offer solutions to pressing local issues. The views expressed in this commentary belong to the author alone.
In my time serving as vice chair of San Antonio’s Small Business Economic Development Advocacy (SBEDA) committee, it has become clear that the next few years of innovation are impossible for the city to ignore.
I run a communications firm in San Antonio. Over the last year, I have watched an overwhelming amount of work from my industry become dominated by artificial intelligence. Press releases. Website copy. Social posts. Branding. Campaign language.
I’ve been building websites for 30-plus years, and I’m willing to make a wager:
Before we vote in our new City Council in 2029, the majority of small businesses will have stopped hiring a firm to build their websites. Instead, they will type a few prompts into a platform and receive a finished product in minutes.
The outputs are faster and seem to be more polished on the surface. But individually, I would argue they are flatter, colder and interchangeable.
According to McKinsey, 92% of businesses intend to invest in generative AI tools over the next three years. To some, this is progress. For small businesses with thin margins, it might feel like relief to access lower costs and faster turnarounds. Those are tangible benefits.
But the cost to the small business ecosystem is real, too.
Today, when the City of San Antonio procures services, they award additional evaluation points to local firms and to small businesses. Until recently, they also rewarded minority and woman-owned businesses.
Whatever you think of that rollback, we still claim the character and equity of our economy matters. We believe that the people who bid on public work, hire our neighbors, and pay taxes here deserve a fair shot against larger out-of-market bidders.
I believe that rubric is about to face a challenge it was not designed for.
Soon, the competition for a contract will become local businesses versus an abundance of local and national machine-driven platforms. On paper, machines will win because they are cheaper, faster, and available around the clock.
This risk poses an opportunity for San Antonio to think ahead and lead in protecting our small business community. And one way to do so is by proactively adding “human points” to our procurement process.
The idea is simple.
Alongside the points we already award for local and small business status, the city would award points to vendors whose work is primarily performed by human professionals; people who can be named, held accountable, and whose expertise is rooted in real experience. Vendors would need to disclose, verifiably, how AI and automation is used in their work.
If human points would currently apply to all vendors and applicants, even better. San Antonio can begin tracking itself as a 100% human-based contractor.
Our public contracts shape the city we become, and we should be intentional about who and what we fund with public dollars.
Small businesses have always competed on identity, trust, and local knowledge built over years of experience. And they are already at a significant disadvantage to larger competitors as we saw play out with closures spiking during COVID. If we allow our procurement process to become a race to the lowest-cost output, we will look up in a few years and find what made San Antonio’s small business community worth protecting has disappeared.
Deciding to purchase from a local small business instead of an international chain pays dividends to our local community. And every dollar spent on family-owned businesses not only helps place food on that family’s table, but it allows our economy to circulate those benefits to our neighbors and instigate growth from the grassroots level up.
We can decide, right now, that human work is worth more than a machine-generated product.
Human points would be a small change to a scoring sheet. But it would be a powerful statement about who we are, and how much we value the people who make San Antonio the city we choose to call home.
Disclosure: Düable is a vendor contracted by the San Antonio Report.
