The race for the AI-powered business platform is on. On August 11, Wix introduced Symphony, a platform that coordinates AI agents to handle business tasks. Hostinger followed with an expanded AI business assistant in September, and GoDaddy has introduced new automation and software connections to its AI website builder.
The announcements reveal where these companies see their next commercial opportunity. Creating an online presence is no longer enough. They want a role in what happens after a business opens its doors.
For entrepreneurs, that ambition addresses a familiar problem. Building a website has become remarkably easy, especially with AI tools that provide fully functional and customized sites in just minutes, but running a successful business remains hard. Business operators must attract customers, answer inquiries, manage advertising, process orders and keep the books in order. An established company can distribute that work among employees.
But the owner of a fledgling business usually handles everything alone, often after finishing another job. AI agents promise to give these entrepreneurs access to specialized capabilities without the expense of hiring a team.
The question is whether AI can move beyond creating content and completing isolated tasks to handling the messy, interconnected work of operating a business. Writing an advertisement takes seconds. Deciding where to run it, determining how much to spend and recognizing when a campaign is losing money require a different level of judgment.
Technology providers are beginning to entrust their agents with more of these decisions. The consequences could extend far beyond the website and technology infrastructure business, changing how small companies buy tech tools, organize their work and compete with much larger enterprises.
Building A Website Was Only Half The Problem
In a one-on-one interview with me this past week, Hostinger CEO Giedrius Zakaitis recalled a time when getting a website online was a technical ordeal.
Zakaitis joined the Lithuania based company nearly 15 years ago, starting in customer support. Customers frequently struggled with problems that would sound foreign to entrepreneurs accustomed to modern website builders. They needed to upload files, configure databases and connect domain names. A mistake could leave their website inaccessible.
Hostinger gradually automated much of that work. Managed WordPress hosting simplified installation, and website builders removed the need to deal with WordPress altogether. More recently, generative AI made it possible to create websites and applications through conversational instructions.
But solving the technical problem exposed a commercial one.
Zakaitis recalls customers who successfully launched their websites, shared them with family members and then discovered that nobody else was visiting.
“I sent it to my mom. What’s next?” he said during our interview.
The website worked, but the business itself wasn’t going anywhere.
Visitors did not materialize simply through the act of publishing a page. The entrepreneur still needed to understand the market, identify prospective customers, develop a marketing strategy and persuade people to buy something.
Zakaitis believes AI can now help address that second set of problems.
For years, Zakaitis explained, customers came to Hostinger knowing what they wanted to build. Their main concern was whether the company could provide the technology and infrastructure to make it happen at an affordable price. But as AI makes building websites and applications easier, customers are asking a more ambitious question.
“Can it help me run my business?” he said.
The distinction is significant for a company whose core customers are people starting their first online ventures, frequently operating alone or with one or two partners.
Hostinger introduced its expanded Agent platform on September 2, combining technical assistance with specialized AI capabilities for planning, research, analysis and business automation. The company says its agents can draw on information from a customer’s existing services, reducing the need to explain the business anew with every interaction.
Zakaitis has a more ambitious destination in mind. He envisions an AI assistant that understands an entrepreneur’s business well enough to identify problems and suggest actions before being asked. The difference is between having a tool that answers questions and having one that recognizes which questions the business owner should be asking.
Web Infrastructure Wants To Become Your AI Business Partner
Hostinger is entering a market where competitors have reached much the same conclusion.
Wix, best known for its website development platform, introduced Symphony in August as a standalone service for individuals and small businesses. The company says the system can learn about an enterprise, assemble specialized AI agents and coordinate their work.
Its central agent, Maestro, serves as the point of contact between the entrepreneur and the other agents. A daily briefing summarizes completed work, identifies opportunities and presents decisions requiring the owner’s attention.
Wix is positioning Symphony as a service that can operate independently of its traditional website platform. The ambition is to remain useful to entrepreneurs regardless of where they maintain their digital presence.
GoDaddy is approaching the same opportunity from its AI website builder. Its September 21 product update introduced connections to services such as Mailchimp, Notion and Google, alongside tools for managing online stores and scheduling recurring website tasks. Customers can connect outside applications through the builder’s conversational interface rather than navigating each service independently.
Shopify has taken a more focused approach. In June, the ecommerce company introduced Campaign Autopilot, a marketing service that uses AI to plan and execute campaigns through advertising and communication channels. Merchants establish budgets, set restrictions and approve activities before they go live. Shopify launched the service in early access for eligible merchants.
While some of these product announcements are incremental additions to a platform leveraging LLMs as a tool to help manage configuration and setup, these firms are pursuing broader business assistants. They share an interest in capturing more of the work that takes place beyond the initial transaction of building a website or opening an online store.
The financial prize could be substantial. A website builder might interact with its customer during the initial setup and occasional redesigns, but a business agent that manages marketing, customer communications and routine operations could become part of the owner’s working day.
Small Businesses Use AI, But Few Let It Run The Show
There is reason to believe entrepreneurs will experiment with these systems and bring AI more into the daily operation of their business.
Research published by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation in June 2026 found that half of employees at small businesses reported using AI at work. Yet the way they used it reveals a gap between the industry’s ambitions and everyday practice.
Among workers who used AI, 64% identified personal productivity activities, such as drafting, summarizing and brainstorming, as their primary application. Another 26% used the technology to assist with recurring tasks. Just 6% reported using AI to automate workflows with minimal human involvement.
The challenge of bridging the gap between assistance and autonomy matters. An entrepreneur might happily ask AI to draft a promotional email, but giving that same system access to a customer database, permission to distribute the message and authority to change future campaigns requires considerably more trust.
There is a commercial hurdle, too. The challenge is to connect the work agents perform with the financial results entrepreneurs care about.
A business owner does not need another subscription that produces reports or generates content or images without improving the actual bottom line. Research that identifies a promising advertising opportunity is useful only if the resulting campaign attracts customers at an acceptable cost. Generating outputs isn’t the same as coordinating activities and operations to generate a positive outcome, requiring domain expertise and experience that the small business operator might not have.
Can AI Help More Entrepreneurs Stay In Business?
Zakaitis acknowledges that making it easier to launch a business does not guarantee that the business will succeed.
People abandon projects for reasons that have little to do with technology. Some discover that their products have limited demand. Others lose interest, encounter personal difficulties or cannot devote enough time to the venture. AI cannot eliminate those problems.
It could, however, make certain tasks less expensive and less intimidating for people who cannot afford professional assistance.
An independent retailer might gain access to market research that once required hiring a consultant, or a freelance designer could automate routine customer communications. A new online merchant could test advertising campaigns without first becoming an expert in digital marketing.
Hostinger points to two customers using AI to expand their businesses. Ninad Burde, founder of astrology platform Aeon Astral, used AI to build an ecommerce website that allows his existing YouTube audience to purchase astrology reports directly, creating a new revenue channel that is already generating results with little additional promotion.
Ansh Bhawnani, founder of cybersecurity education company Bitten Tech, has gone a step further, using AI-powered workflows to engage his online community and developing an AI cybersecurity mentor that is already generating new signups and conversions, according to Hostinger.
The examples illustrate two different stages of AI adoption: using the technology to create a business opportunity and putting it to work on activities that previously required the owner’s direct involvement. Neither establishes that AI can operate an entire business independently, but both offer a glimpse of what entrepreneurs stand to gain.
These applications are more modest than the vision of a completely autonomous business, but they may prove more immediately valuable. Entrepreneurs will judge these systems by whether they save time, reduce expenses, provide competitive advantages and attract paying customers and help their businesses survive.
What Happens When AI Knows Your Business?
Zakaitis believes one answer lies in giving AI agents persistent knowledge of the businesses they serve.
Consider someone selling specialty food products through a new online store. A conventional chatbot might provide marketing suggestions after receiving a detailed prompt explaining the products, target customers and available budget.
An agent connected to the store could approach the problem differently.
Zakaitis described a prospective scenario in which Hostinger’s system detects that a customer has published a website, researches competing businesses overnight and returns with suggestions for attracting visitors.
The entrepreneur might learn that local search advertising appears relatively inexpensive or that competitors are overlooking a particular social media channel.
The research would not require the owner to understand how to operate a sophisticated AI research tool. It could begin with the system recognizing that a newly published website needs customers.
Zakaitis described a future experience in which the AI retains information about customers’ businesses with their permission. The aim is to avoid presenting users with a blank conversational interface every morning. An agent could remember previous decisions, review recent activity and propose work that reflects the circumstances of the individual business.
Wix is pursuing a related idea with Symphony’s daily briefings and coordinated agents.
Both approaches suggest a change in how entrepreneurs might interact with business software. Instead of opening separate applications to check orders, review advertising performance and draft customer messages, an owner could use a single AI interface that coordinates those services.
That arrangement introduces a new commercial question for software providers.
If the AI agent becomes the main point of contact with the business owner, what happens to the companies providing the underlying applications? An entrepreneur might care less about which marketing platform, analytics service or website builder performs a particular task, provided the agent delivers the desired outcome at a reasonable price.
For Hostinger, Wix, Shopify and GoDaddy, the contest is already going beyond whose website builder produces the most attractive pages or which tools can perform an underlying service at a good price. It extends to whose AI becomes the software an entrepreneur turns to first.
Feature image credit: Getty
