· AI
Two Surveys Asked If Small Businesses Use AI. One Said 66 Percent. The Other Said 24 Percent.
If a survey is telling you that you are the last small business owner on earth without AI, check who paid for the survey before you believe it.
Here is a number that should make you nervous if you have not touched AI yet: 66 percent of small businesses now use it, according to a survey Thryv commissioned in April 2026. Here is a number that should calm you back down: 24 percent, according to the National Federation of Independent Business, a trade group with no AI product to sell. Both surveys asked small business owners whether they use AI. They landed almost three times apart.
That gap is the real story, more than either headline number is.
Start with the optimistic read, because it deserves a fair hearing before I pick it apart. Thryv's survey, of 561 non-customer small business owners, found real reported gains among the businesses that did adopt: 70 percent said AI increased their revenue over the past year, and 55 percent said it cut costs. Adoption was up from a year earlier. Even the discomfort in that survey cuts in AI's favor. Seventy percent of owners say they need more training to use it well, which is the complaint of people already using a tool, not people ignoring one. If that number is close to right, the business owner who has not started is genuinely behind, and waiting for a perfect plan while competitors learn by doing is a real cost.
Now the problem. NFIB's survey, fielded among its own membership, found 24 percent of small employers use AI, with adoption climbing hard by size: 21 percent of firms with fewer than 10 employees, versus 48 percent of firms with more than 50. That size pattern lines up closely with the Census Bureau's Business Trends and Outlook Survey, which found fewer than 20 percent of businesses with four or fewer employees reporting AI use in their operations as of May 2026, against 37 percent at firms with 250 or more employees. Two sources with nothing to sell you landed close together. One source selling AI-enabled marketing software landed three times higher.
I do not know the exact question wording either survey used, so I will separate what is fact from what is my read. The fact: three independent surveys, two of them neutral, put real small-business AI adoption well under half. My read, and this part is speculation, is that a vendor survey can still ask a looser question, something closer to "have you tried an AI tool" than "does AI run any part of your operations," and that gap alone could explain most of the difference. Thryv's release does not publish its exact survey instrument, so neither of us can check that for certain.
One more NFIB number is worth sitting with. Ninety-eight percent of small employers said AI had not changed their workforce size at all. Whatever AI is doing inside the quarter of small businesses using it, it is not primarily a headcount story yet. That matches what we see with clients. The work gets reorganized around a handful of specific, provable tasks. It does not get replaced wholesale, and the businesses that try to replace wholesale in one move are the likelier candidates for the 95 percent of generative AI pilots that MIT's Project NANDA found showed no measurable profit impact in last year's review.
So if you are deciding whether to start, do not start by asking what percentage of businesses like yours have already moved. Every number in that category is contested, self-reported, or published by someone with a reason to round up. Start by naming one task you already know is expensive: the hours it eats weekly, multiplied by what an hour of that person's time actually costs you. That number is yours, not a survey's, and nobody has an incentive to inflate it for you.
If that number is real and the task is specific, that is worth a conversation, not a leap of faith. Mojo's AI automation practice runs that math with businesses before proposing anything, and says so honestly when the answer comes back no. If you want a second opinion on one task before you spend a dollar on the rest, get in touch.
Sources
References used in this article. Links also appear alongside the relevant claims.
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