Bizkit Insights

Everyone Says They're 'Using AI.' Almost Nobody Has Actually Built It Into Their Business.

By Karla Kangleon · Published 2026-09-07 · 3 min read

Small business owner working on a laptop at a desk

Ask small business owners if they "use AI" in 2026 and most will say yes. Ask if it's actually built into how the business runs, and the room goes quiet.

That gap isn't a vibe — it's now measured, twice, by two separate surveys that landed within months of each other.

The number nobody's bragging about

Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Small Businesses Voices survey — 1,256 small business owners across all 50 states, DC, and Puerto Rico, fielded by Babson College and David Binder Research in early 2026 — found that 76% of small businesses currently use AI in some form. Ninety-three percent of those users say it's had a positive impact.

Then comes the number that actually matters: only 14% say AI is fully embedded in their core operations. Everyone else is somewhere between "tried it once" and "uses it for the occasional email."

Small businesses: using AI vs. fully integrated into operations (2026)

Small businesses: using AI vs. fully integrated into operations (2026)
Label	Value
Currently using AI	76%
Say AI is fully embedded in core operations	14%
Want more training to implement it	73%

Source: Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Voices survey, 2026

Thryv's own 2026 adoption report, based on 561 U.S. small and midsize business decision-makers surveyed in April, tells a similar story from a different angle: AI adoption climbed to 66%, up from 55% a year earlier — real growth — but 70% of owners admit they still need more training to use it effectively, despite 86% saying they're comfortable with the tools.

Comfortable and effective are not the same thing. That's the whole article, honestly.

Dabbling isn't the same business decision as integrating

Here's what "using AI" usually means in practice: someone opens ChatGPT to draft a caption, or asks Gemini to summarize an email thread. Useful, cheap, zero risk. It's also not a system — it's a habit that lives entirely in one person's browser tab and disappears the day they're out sick.

"Integrated" means the AI is doing something the business actually depends on: qualifying leads before a human sees them, drafting the first pass of every customer reply, generating a week of content on a schedule, flagging invoices that are about to go overdue. It runs whether or not the owner remembers to open the tab.

That's a much smaller club — the Goldman Sachs number says 14% of small businesses are in it.

What's on the other side of that gap

The businesses that do cross from dabbling to integrated report real, specific upside, not just "efficiency."

What small businesses report once AI use sticks

What small businesses report once AI use sticks
Label	Value
Say AI saves them time	92% of AI-using owners
Say it increased revenue	70% of AI-using owners
Say it reduced costs	55% of AI-using owners

Source: Thryv 2026 AI and Small Business Adoption Report

Seventy percent link AI to higher revenue over the past year. Fifty-five percent say it cut costs, and among Thryv's respondents, most estimated monthly savings between $500 and $2,000 — real money for a business that size. Ninety-two percent say it saves them time, and nearly 80% expect to get back somewhere between 11 and 60 hours a month once it's actually working.

Eleven to 60 hours is a wide range, and that's the point: the payoff scales with how deep the integration goes, not with how many tools are installed.

Closing the gap without a consulting budget

Both surveys converge on the same blocker: training, not tools. Seventy-three percent of Goldman Sachs respondents and 70% of Thryv's said more training and implementation support is what stands between them and getting real value out of AI. Not a better model. Not a bigger budget. Just someone showing them how to wire it into an actual workflow.

That's a solvable problem, and it doesn't require hiring anyone. Pick one recurring task — the one that eats the most hours or the one every customer touches — and build the AI into that specific workflow until it runs without you remembering to prompt it. Then pick the next one. Integration is a sequence of small, deliberate decisions, not a single big purchase.

The takeaway

"Using AI" is now the default, not the differentiator — three out of four small businesses can say it. What separates the ones actually growing from it is whether the tool is wired into the business or just sitting in a browser tab, waiting to be remembered. That's a gap you close one workflow at a time, and it's exactly the kind of gap brandbizkit's AI transformation guidance is built to close.