What's actually true about small businesses and AI.
The AI-statistics economy is mostly vendor blogs quoting each other. This page keeps a short list of numbers that trace to a primary source, with the source linked. Verified August 2026; refreshed when the sources are.
Read these as separate measurements, not one funnel. The figures below come from different studies of different populations — surveys of small-business owners, bank transaction data, and enterprise pilot analysis. Chaining them into a single "58% → 17.7% → 5%" story is exactly the kind of misuse this page exists to correct.
Adoption vs. actual spend
of US small businesses report using generative AI — up from 23% in 2023
U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Empowering Small Business · 2025actually pay an AI vendor — measured across 4.6M business bank accounts, not a survey
JPMorgan Chase Institute, Small Business in the Age of AI · Dec 2025of enterprise AI pilots show no measurable P&L impact — enterprise data, not SMB
Enterprise pilots — the most misquoted AI statistic in circulation. See the essay.
MIT Project NANDA, The GenAI Divide · 2025returned per week where it does work — owner plus staff hours, median
Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council · 2026Under the headline — same bank data, sliced
All four rows below come from the same JPMorgan Chase Institute dataset (4.6M business banking accounts, through Dec 2025) — these CAN be compared with each other.
AI adoption at employer firms vs. firms with no employees
JPMorgan Chase Institute · Dec 2025adoption in the information industry — the highest of any sector
JPMorgan Chase Institute · Dec 2025adoption in construction — service and trade businesses sit at the back of the line
JPMorgan Chase Institute · Dec 2025median first-month AI spend, 2019 adopters vs. 2024 adopters — the entry cost fell 60%
JPMorgan Chase Institute · Dec 2025Service businesses and the phone
A note on this category: "missed call statistics" is a swamp — figures from 27% to 62% circulate with no primary data behind most of them. We list only what traces to real call data, with the vendor relationship disclosed.
of inbound calls to home-services businesses go unanswered
Invoca sells call tracking — real platform data, attributed visibly.
Invoca, home-services call analytics · 2024The gap between "we use AI" and "AI paid for itself" is the whole job — and finding your version of that gap is the free part.
Get a free teardown →