Enterprise

SMBs are flooding into AI. Most aren't getting ROI — and vendors are racing to fix it.

A Pax8 report this week pegged the readiness-reality gap at 95% of organizations reporting zero ROI, even as nearly nine in ten SMBs experiment with AI. Microsoft, Anthropic, and a wave of no-code platforms are repositioning around the gap.

By Asher Glick · Enterprise software desk · 2026-06-16 · 4 min read

Photo: Unsplash / Charles Forerunner — Small business team working at laptops around a shared desk

Pax8’s June 8 report from its Beyond 2026 conference, “The Agentic Workforce Economy,” landed on a number the SMB software industry has been quietly dreading: 95% of organizations say they’re getting zero ROI from AI, even as roughly 90% of small businesses are already deploying or piloting it. The readiness-reality gap is now the central commercial problem in the category, and every major vendor is repositioning around it.

The Pax8 data is internally contradictory in instructive ways. 78% of SMBs using AI still call it a game-changer. 74% believe it lets them punch above their weight against larger competitors. 62% say they won’t remain competitive within three years without it. Belief is near-universal; payoff isn’t. Pax8 puts the prize at roughly 45% profitability uplift moving from basic to intermediate adoption, and around 111% from intermediate to fully integrated. The money is real for the firms that get past pilot purgatory.

Microsoft’s answer arrived May 28: Microsoft 365 Business Standard with Copilot and Business Premium with Copilot, both launching July 1, bundling Copilot into the small-business SKUs alongside more than 1,000 connectors to apps like Shopify, Xero, and Docusign, plus a contextual “Work IQ” layer. It’s a packaging move dressed as a product move. On the April 29 earnings call, Microsoft disclosed paid Copilot seats had crossed 20 million; a CNBC report two weeks earlier had described commercial chief Judson Althoff overhauling the sales motion after analysts pressed on January’s adoption figures. The 20-million number is the response to that pressure.

Underneath the hyperscaler layer, the gap is being worked from below. Pax8’s own Managed Intelligence Provider program and Agent Store both go generally available in July, aimed at the 47,000 IT partners and 800,000 SMBs already on its marketplace. “The partner who makes AI work for their clients wins,” said Craig Donovan, Pax8’s COO, framing the channel’s pitch with unusual candor. No-code, model-agnostic entrants like LemonLime, which wraps Anthropic and other model providers into a “company brain” tuned for SMBs, are pitching the same gap from the software side: less pilot, more deployed workflow.

The structural read is straightforward. The seat counts are accumulating faster than the outcomes, and whoever closes that loop, whether through channel partners, bundled SKUs, or thin no-code layers over frontier models, captures the next phase.

Sources