This eco-friendly brand offers compostable alternatives to household items. AI has been key to scaling its operations.

• Repurpose is an eco-friendly brand that offers alternatives to plastics.
• The small business is using AI across the company, including for accounting and marketing.
• This article is part of "How AI Is Changing Everything: Small Business," a series exploring how small businesses are using AI for success.

Known for its plant-based, compostable home and kitchen products, Repurpose has spent the past 15 years building an eco-friendly brand that gives consumers a viable alternative to plastics.

Repurpose says it owns one-third of the compostable-tableware category and its products are sold at 20,000 retailers nationwide. Products include plates, cups, cutlery, and kitchen bags.

To better compete in the crowded consumer-goods market, Repurpose has turned to AI to automate its financial processes, optimize its marketing campaigns, and streamline its employee review process.

A sustainability-minded brand using an energy-intensive technology like artificial intelligence might seem counterintuitive, but in today's business environment, it's virtually unavoidable. AI is now embedded into most of the tools businesses use every day, so for a 21-person company like Repurpose, it's vital to embrace the technology.

"We're a small but mighty company, so we do rely on external partners, and we need to utilize tools and technology to be able to compete in the marketplace with these much larger conventional players," Lauren Gropper, Repurpose's CEO, said, adding that AI has "been really helpful for us to help scale where we don't necessarily have the same financial resources" and that "it's leveled the playing field."

Developing an AI-powered organization

Gropper said Repurpose began using AI last year. The company started experimenting with ChatGPT for marketing and copywriting support. It then incorporated a third-party financial platform to improve its billing processes and streamline external payments to vendors and contractors.

The tool prepopulates vendor information into different fields and autofills invoice data, so Repurpose's four-person finance team doesn't have to input this information manually. Before using AI, Repurpose largely relied on spreadsheets and paper-based processes for financial management. Automating its accounting has eliminated the need for physical signatures and paper checks and documents, which saves time, is better suited for Repurpose's entirely remote-work environment, and better aligns with the company's sustainability mission.

Overall, Repurpose estimates that AI saves its finance team two days a week on accounts payable tasks.

"It's been able to streamline their productivity and give them some time back to do other tasks," Gropper said.

Repurpose also leans on AI for employee reviews. The company uses an AI-enabled review platform with an AI assistant feature, which provides suggestions to help employees expand on the comments they've written in their reviews.

The small business has incorporated several embedded AI tools, but as its use of the technology has grown, so has its awareness of the downsides.

Balancing innovation and impact

"Being a company that is focused on sustainability, we are very conscious of the fact that AI is very resource-heavy, and it's something that we take very seriously," Gropper said.

AI drives automation, but it also requires lots of computing power. Data centers, which underpin AI operations, consume tons of electricity. The International Energy Agency estimates electricity consumption in data centers will double by 2026 from 2022 levels — which would be on par with Japan's current total consumption.

Gropper said Repurpose needs AI tools to function and scale its operations, but the company is educating itself on AI and carefully evaluating external tools to become better stewards of the technology.

"It's threading the needle between wanting to be as innovative as possible and utilizing these amazing tools, but at the same time being conscious of what is the impact and what are we contributing?" she said.

Small businesses that want to leverage AI likely will have to buy, rather than build, their tools. Gropper said her best advice for other small-business owners is to work with technology providers and experiment with generative-AI platforms like ChatGPT to accelerate their artificial intelligence implementation.

"There's just so much available online and so many resources to get started and test prompts," she said. "It's all there for the taking."