Perception of Small Business Owners in the Service Sector in Indonesia towards Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) as a Business Development Innovation

This study illuminates the nuanced perceptions of Indonesian service sector MSME owners toward AGI as a business development innovation, revealing that while they envision AGI as a transformative cognitive partner capable of contex-tual reasoning, adaptive learning, and creative amplification surpassing narrow AI tools by addressing unstructured challenges like hyper local demand forecast-ing and emotional nuance in customer interactions significant feasibility barriers persist, primarily centered on unpredictable costs (e.g., hidden fees, infrastruc-ture scalability) and technical complexity (e.g., non-intuitive interfaces, legacy system integration), which collectively heighten perceptions of AGI as a high risk investment; nevertheless, owners pragmatically advocate for context sensitive solutions such as modular pay per feature pricing, vernacular user interfaces, and incremental integration pathways to democratize access, aligning with their envi-sioned high impact use cases where AGI would drive operational efficiency (e.g., automating inventory, scheduling, and error reduction) and strategic innovation (e.g., hyper personalized customer experiences, real time market adaptation, and proactive risk anticipation), ultimately positioning AGI not merely as a survival tool but as a dual use engine for resilience and competitive differentiation that could redefine MSME scalability through intelligent resource optimization rather than linear resource accumulation, thereby urging AGI developers to recalibrate innovation toward inclusive, co designed ecosystems prioritizing affordability, usability, and seamless workflow augmentation to bridge the gap between theo-retical promise and grassroots realities in emerging economies.