Ask small-business owners whether they use AI and most now say yes. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's Empowering Small Business report put self-reported generative-AI use at 58% in 2025 — up from 40% the year before and 23% in 2023. Whatever else is true, the belief has arrived: owners think of themselves as AI users now.
Then look at what they pay for. The JPMorgan Chase Institute did something better than a survey: it read the transactions — de-identified payment data across 4.6 million Chase business banking accounts, 2019 through 2025, looking for actual payments to AI vendors.
Both numbers are real, from credible sources, and they aren't actually in conflict — they measure different things. The survey counts anyone who's pasted an email into a free chatbot. The bank data counts businesses that wrote a check. Roughly forty points of "AI adoption" is people using free tools casually, with no line item, no workflow, and — critically — no way of knowing what it's worth.
The distance between "we use AI" and "we pay for AI because it pays us back" is about forty percentage points wide. That gap is the real map of the opportunity.
The Chase data gets more interesting the further down you go. Firms with employees adopt at 26.1% versus 15.3% for solo operations — having staff to leverage makes the spend rational sooner. Industry splits are starker: information businesses lead at 39.3%, professional services at 30.3% — while construction sits at 8.9% and transportation at 5.4%. The businesses that run on trucks, phones, and paper — the ones drowning in exactly the work this technology is good at — are the least likely to have bought any of it.
One more figure worth knowing: the price of entry collapsed. New adopters in 2019 spent about $50 a month on their first AI vendor; by 2024 that was about $20. The barrier isn't cost anymore. It's knowing what to buy, wiring it into how the business actually runs, and being able to tell whether it worked.
Here's the honest read of all of it together. If you own a service business and you've been feeling behind on AI — you're not behind your competitors. In your industry, more than nine in ten of them haven't spent a dollar either. What separates the businesses getting something real out of this (the ones reporting their week back — a median 16.5 hours returned weekly between owner and staff, per the SBE Council) isn't that they moved first. It's that they picked one measurable problem, instrumented it, and put the tool inside a workflow instead of beside it.
That first step — finding the one measurable problem — is the thing we give away. Send your website and we'll send back a written teardown of where your business is most likely leaking time and money. Free, and useful whether or not we ever talk.