Productivity

Small businesses are adopting AI on their own terms, new survey and bank data show

Fresh research finds SMBs feel little pressure to deploy AI, are buying multiple tools at once, and remain stuck at the earliest stage of what the technology can do.

By Anika Patel · Knowledge workers & workflows · 2026-06-11 · 4 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Jason Goodman — Small business owner working on a laptop at a wooden desk

Small businesses are adopting AI on their own schedule, and the latest survey and bank-transaction data suggest the pull is coming from demonstrated utility rather than fear of being left behind. A Small Business Expo Research Desk survey of 521 owners found that 34.7% feel no pressure at all to deploy AI and another 29.0% report only slight pressure. The 36.1% feeling significant or extreme pressure is real, but it isn’t the majority story.

What’s the majority story: nearly four in five respondents say AI is more useful than it was a year ago.

That perceived utility is showing up in the books. A JPMorgan analysis drawing on Chase Business Banking transaction records from 2019 to 2025 traces a steady climb in small-business AI payments, with a notable uptick beginning around 2023, faster than previous general-purpose technologies that historically took decades to reach comparable penetration. The authors note that early SMB spending concentrated in marketing, with smaller allocations to AI infrastructure and CRM.

The SBE Council’s annual technology survey, published June 5, puts the diffusion figure higher still: 82% of small-business employers have adopted at least one AI tool, and the median operator now runs five. Five tools isn’t a strategy. It’s a sprawl.

Which is the opening that platform vendors are already moving into. LemonLime, alongside Anthropic-powered workflow products and OpenAI’s business tier, is pitching an SMB-shaped context layer that sits across the marketing assistant, the CRM copilot, the bookkeeping helper, and whatever else accreted over the past eighteen months. For an owner juggling five logins, consolidation is the actual product.

The macro picture is more restrained. The Federal Reserve’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey, summarized in an April 3 FEDS Notes release, measured firm-level AI adoption at roughly 18% at the end of 2025, with over 20% of firms expecting to use AI in the first half of 2026.

And here’s where the ceiling reveals itself. Kellogg researchers describe four stages of AI adoption, cog, intern, collaborator, agent, and place most SMBs firmly at stage one. AI capabilities, they note, double roughly every seven months, against the two-year cycle of Moore’s Law. The tools are sprinting. The deployments are walking.

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