The AI Gap in Small Business

Ask small-business owners whether they use artificial intelligence and most now say yes. Ask whether it has become part of how the business actually runs and the answer changes.

The clearest view of that difference comes from Goldman Sachs' 10,000 Small Businesses Voices survey, released in March 2026. Seventy-six percent of the owners surveyed said they currently use AI. Among those users, 93% said it has had a positive impact on their business, and 84% named increased efficiency and productivity as the primary benefit. Looking ahead, 67% expect AI to increase their revenue. Yet only 14% said AI is fully embedded in their core operations, and 73% said they would benefit from additional access to training and implementation resources.^[1]

That is the gap this report is about. It is not a gap between owners who believe in AI and owners who don't. The same owners who report good results are the ones saying the work is unfinished. AI has arrived in most small businesses as something tried, and in very few as something built in.

The pattern holds in larger samples. Intuit's 2026 AI Impact Report, which combines survey responses from more than 34,000 small and midsize business owners with anonymized data from more than 5.3 million QuickBooks businesses, found that 77% of U.S. businesses now use AI regularly, up from 48% in July 2024. Seventy-eight percent said AI has improved their productivity, and 43% said it has increased their revenue, against 2% who said it went the other way.^[2] But the same report looked at what businesses actually pay for. Among U.S. businesses with observed payment records, 12% paid for dedicated AI tools between 2021 and 2025.^[2] Using AI and investing in AI turn out to be very different numbers.

A reader who goes looking for "the" small-business AI adoption rate will find figures ranging from under one in five to more than three in four. They are not contradicting each other. They are measuring different things.

The U.S. Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey asks a nationally representative sample of businesses a narrow question: whether the business used AI in any business function in the past two weeks. (The Census Bureau broadened that wording in November 2025. The question originally asked about AI used in producing goods or services, rather than for simple tasks like drafting emails.) Between December 2025 and May 2026, overall use held between 17% and 20%, and the national rate stood at 19.8% as of May 3, 2026. Size matters: 37% of firms with at least 250 employees reported using AI, compared with fewer than 20% of firms with four or fewer employees. Over that period, use rose among firms with at least 20 employees but did not change significantly among firms with fewer than 20.^[3]

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's 2026 Empowering Small Business report, conducted with Teneo Research, surveyed 3,732 small businesses with fewer than 250 employees online between July 23 and August 6, 2026. It found that 66% now use AI, up from 58% in 2025 and nearly three times the 23% recorded in 2023. The most common uses were marketing and promotions, improving the customer experience, managing customer relationships and accounting.^[4]

Intuit's 77% counts any kind of AI use, including free tools and features built into software the business already pays for.^[2] Goldman Sachs surveyed 1,256 participants in its own 10,000 Small Businesses program, owners who have already sought out growth education, between January 27 and February 4, 2026.^[1]

Read together, the sources describe one picture from different distances. Casual use, an owner asking a chatbot to tighten a paragraph or a feature that switched itself on inside existing software, is now common. The Chamber and Intuit numbers capture it. A deliberate decision to use AI in the operations of the business, the thing the Census question and Goldman's "fully embedded" figure are closer to, is still the exception. And the smallest businesses, the ones with the fewest people to spare for the work, are the ones the national data shows moving least.

The owners themselves say what is missing, and it is not interest. In the Goldman Sachs survey, owners named a lack of technical expertise, difficulty choosing tools and data privacy concerns as barriers to deeper integration, and nearly three in four said they would benefit from more training and implementation help.^[1] In Intuit's research, across the countries it studied, the top barriers cluster around privacy and security, fear of errors and uncertainty about what AI can do. Cost was not the biggest one.^[2]

Our reading, from working inside owner-led businesses, is that these are one problem seen from several sides. Most AI reaches a small business as a product: a subscription, a login, a feature in a tool. The product works. What it cannot do is look at a particular business, decide which part of the work it should take on, connect itself to the systems already running, and keep working when the owner is busy. That work falls to the owner, who is the person with the least time to do it. So the tool gets tried, it helps with something small, and it stays small.

The pattern is easy to recognize. A contractor knows a missed call is a lost job, but answering the phone is still a person's job because nobody has set anything else up to do it. A growing firm knows its follow-up is uneven, but the leads still live in an inbox. An owner knows the books will be there on Sunday. Each of those is a problem AI can take on today, and in most small businesses none of them has been handed over, because handing it over is a project, not a purchase.

The national data points to the answer the owners are already asking for. When 73% of the owners surveyed say they would benefit from implementation help, the bottleneck is not the technology.^[1] It is the distance between a general-purpose tool and the specific way one business works.

Closing that distance looks less like buying software and more like adding a capability to the team. It starts with understanding the business: how customers find it, where calls and leads come in, how work moves from the first conversation to the final invoice, and where time and money quietly slip away. Only then does it make sense to decide what to build, whether that is an AI receptionist that answers every call, outreach that follows up without being reminded, a customer system the business owns instead of rents, or an agent that keeps the back office moving. And it does not end at launch. The businesses that report AI as fully embedded are, almost by definition, the ones where someone made sure it kept working.

This is the work CapEx Solutions does. We are a Raleigh firm, and we build and run custom AI for owner-led businesses from inside the business, because that is where the gap is.

If you run a business in the Triangle and you recognize the gap, the first step is not a purchase. It is an honest look at where AI would pay off first in your business specifically.

CapEx offers that as a free assessment at capexsolutions.ai/start. We review how your business runs and return a plan that names where AI would make the biggest difference first, whether or not you decide to work with us. If you would rather hear the technology before you read about it, call (984) 372-1175. The phone at our own front desk is answered by the AI receptionist we built for ourselves.

The national numbers say most owners have already tried AI and liked what they saw. The next step is making it part of how the business runs.

This report is CapEx Solutions' analysis of published national research. Every figure is drawn from the primary source listed below and reported as the source stated it; CapEx did not conduct its own survey for this report. Interpretation, where offered, is ours and is identified as such.