Key AI Statistics at a Glance

Before we get into the data by category, here are the headline numbers that define where AI stands for small businesses and ecommerce in 2026. Every figure below links to a named study in the sources list.

AI Adoption by Small Businesses

AI adoption among small businesses has shifted from early experimentation to mainstream in under two years. Here is what the data actually shows — including where different surveys agree and where they differ.

• Small business AI adoption reached almost 60% in 2025 — up from 40% in 2024 and 23% in 2023, more than doubling in two years.Source: U.S. Chamber of Commerce, August 2025
• A second annual tracking survey found overall small business AI usage jumped from 39% in 2024 to 55% in 2025 — a 41% increase in a single year.Source: Thryv AI and Small Business Survey, May 2025 (540 small business decision-makers)
• AI adoption among companies with 10–100 employees jumped from 47% to 68% in a single year (2024–2025).Source: Thryv, May 2025
• 76% of small businesses report using AI — but only 14% say AI is fully embedded in their core operations.Source: Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Voices, March 2026 (1,256 respondents)
• 75% of SMBs are at least experimenting with AI — and adoption is higher among growing businesses (83%) than among their stagnant or declining peers.Source: Salesforce SMB Trends Report, December 2024 (3,350 respondents)
• 80% of SMBs that use AI believe it is commonly used among their peers — but only a third of non-users agree. Many small businesses are underestimating how quickly competitors are building an advantage.Source: Salesforce SMB Trends Report, December 2024
• The 2025 cohort of new small businesses reached 10% AI adoption in just six months — compared with 77 months for the 2019 cohort, 62 for 2020 and 51 for 2021. This is based on actual payments to AI services in de-identified Chase business banking data, not self-reported survey answers.Source: JPMorgan Chase Institute, April 2026 (transaction data, 2019–2025)
• 96% of small business owners plan to adopt emerging technologies, including AI.Source: U.S. Chamber of Commerce, August 2025
• Despite fears about AI and jobs, 82% of small businesses using AI increased their workforce over the past year.Source: U.S. Chamber of Commerce, August 2025
• Across OECD countries, firm-level AI adoption more than doubled in two years: 8.7% in 2023 → 14.2% in 2024 → 20.2% in 2025.Source: OECD, 2025
• 41% of the U.S. workforce now uses generative AI for their job, and about 50% of the population uses it outside work — but only 12% of workers used it daily in the last week.Source: Real-Time Population Survey, November 2025, via Federal Reserve FEDS Notes, April 2026

AI in Ecommerce

AI has moved from an optional add-on to operational infrastructure in retail. The statistics below cover market size, retailer adoption, consumer shopping behaviour, and the measured revenue impact of AI tools.

Market Size

• A record $257.8 billion was spent online during the 2025 holiday season — including more than $4 billion per day for 25 days, up from 18 days in 2024.Source: Adobe Analytics, January 2026
• Agentic commerce — AI agents that shop on behalf of consumers — could reach $385 billion in U.S. ecommerce impact by 2030.Source: Morgan Stanley, December 2025

Retailer Adoption

• 9 out of 10 retailers are now adopting or piloting AI, and over 80% are using or piloting generative AI — with content generation for marketing and advertising the most common application.Source: NVIDIA State of AI in Retail and CPG, January 2025
• 93% of ecommerce companies have used AI for at least one year, and 84% of brands are investing in conversational commerce as a strategic pillar this year.Source: Gorgias State of Conversational Commerce, February 2026
• AI currently handles 31% of customer interactions at ecommerce brands — expected to rise to 47% within two years.Source: Gorgias, February 2026

Consumer Shopping Behaviour

• 68% of consumers used at least one AI tool as part of their shopping in the past three months.Source: ICSC / McKinsey consumer survey, May 2026
• 81% of shoppers using AI assistants say it improved their shopping experience.Source: Adobe, January 2026
• Shoppers arriving from AI assistants spend 45% more time on site, view 13% more pages per visit, and are 33% less likely to leave immediately.Source: Adobe Analytics, January 2026
• 47% of consumers report trust in AI for shopping; 64% of AI-using shoppers are satisfied with the links they receive, 65% say AI made them more confident in their purchase, and 68% are less likely to return the product — contributing to online returns falling 1.2% year-over-year.Source: Adobe Holiday 2025 Consumer Survey, January 2026

Revenue Impact

• 79% of brands say AI-driven conversational commerce has increased their sales.Source: Gorgias, February 2026
• 93% of AI-driven purchases happen within 48 hours of first contact — and 80% of AI-recommended purchases occur the same day.Source: Gorgias, February 2026
• Revenue per visit from AI traffic ran 84% above non-AI sources from January to July 2025 — before jumping to +254% during the holiday season.Source: Adobe Analytics, January 2026

AI Productivity & Time Savings

How much time does AI actually save — and is the productivity gain real? Here is what the highest-quality research shows: randomised controlled trials, not vendor claims.

• 75% of knowledge workers worldwide use AI at work, and 46% started within the previous six months.Source: Microsoft & LinkedIn Work Trend Index, 2024 (31,000 workers, 31 markets)
• 78% of AI users bring their own AI tools to work rather than waiting for company-provided ones — rising to 80% at small and medium-sized companies.Source: Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2024
• Among workers using AI: 90% say it saves them time, 85% say it helps them focus on their most important work, 84% say it boosts their creativity, and 83% say they enjoy their work more.Source: Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2024
• Marketers using AI report being 44% more productive, saving an average of 11 hours per week.Source: ZoomInfo Generative AI Marketing Survey, 2025
• In a randomised trial of GitHub Copilot across Microsoft, Accenture and a Fortune 100 electronics firm (~5,000 developers), AI assistance increased completed coding tasks by about 26%.Source: Cui et al., Copilot RCT, September 2024
• 66% of business leaders say they would not hire someone without AI skills — and 71% would rather hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced one without them.Source: Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2024

AI Revenue & ROI

The business case for AI has moved from theoretical to measurable — but the returns are uneven. Here is what companies actually report on revenue, margins, and return on investment.

• Organisations using Salesforce Marketing Cloud achieved a 299% return on investment over three years — a composite of five organisations in a vendor-commissioned Forrester Total Economic Impact study.Source: Salesforce / Forrester TEI study
• Only 39% of organisations attribute any enterprise-level EBIT impact to AI — and most of those say it accounts for less than 5% of EBIT. The roughly 6% of companies attributing 5%+ EBIT impact are the ones redesigning workflows rather than layering AI onto existing processes.Source: McKinsey State of AI, November 2025
• 56% of CEOs say AI has delivered no significant financial benefit to date. 33% report gains in either cost or revenue — but only 12% report both.Source: PwC 29th Global CEO Survey, January 2026 (published 19 Jan 2026)

Top AI Use Cases for Business

Where are small businesses and ecommerce brands actually deploying AI? The verified data comes from two directions: what small businesses told us in our own survey, and what ecommerce platforms measure across their customer bases.

The full use-case breakdown from our survey — ten categories, base of 378 AI users — is in the survey section below.

Barriers to AI Adoption

Understanding why businesses have not adopted AI — or have not got value from it — is as important as understanding why they have.

• The top barriers for small business AI users: concerns about data privacy and security (50%), lack of technical expertise (49%), and difficulty choosing the right AI tools (48%).Source: Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses Voices, March 2026
• 73% of small businesses say they would benefit from additional access to AI training and implementation resources.Source: Goldman Sachs, March 2026
• 52% of people who use AI at work are reluctant to admit using it for their most important tasks — and 53% worry it makes them look replaceable.Source: Microsoft Work Trend Index, 2024
• Concern about data security among small businesses fell 40% year-over-year between the 2024 and 2025 survey waves.Source: Thryv, May 2025
• In the EU, lack of technical expertise is the most-cited barrier among enterprises that considered AI but decided not to use it.Source: Eurostat, Use of AI in Enterprises, 2025
• 65% of U.S. small businesses are worried that a patchwork of state-level AI laws will drive up legal and compliance costs.Source: U.S. Chamber of Commerce, August 2025
• More than two-thirds of organisations say that 30% or fewer of their generative AI experiments will be fully scaled within three to six months — organisational change moves slower than the technology.Source: Deloitte State of Generative AI in the Enterprise, January 2025 (2,773 respondents, 14 countries)
• By some estimates, more than 80% of AI projects fail — twice the failure rate of non-AI IT projects.Source: RAND Corporation, August 2024

AI Adoption by Industry

AI adoption is highly uneven across sectors. The table below shows both firm-level adoption (Census Bureau BTOS, late 2025) and worker-level generative AI use (Real-Time Population Survey, November 2025) — two different lenses on the same industries, as compiled in the Federal Reserve’s April 2026 analysis.

Firm-level and worker-level rates measure different things and are not directly comparable — see why the numbers vary. Both columns: Federal Reserve FEDS Notes, April 2026, compiling Census BTOS and Real-Time Population Survey data.

AI Market Size & Growth

The AI market is growing faster than almost any technology market in history. Here are the headline figures from the most credible published sources — with forecasts labelled as forecasts.

• The global generative AI market was valued at $103.58 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $161 billion in 2026, growing to $1.26 trillion by 2034 — a 29.3% CAGR.Source: Fortune Business Insights, 2026
• Gartner forecast worldwide generative AI spending to reach $644 billion in 2025 — a projected 76.4% increase over 2024, with roughly 80% of that spend going to hardware.Source: Gartner forecast, March 2025
• U.S. private AI investment hit $109.1 billion in 2024 — nearly 12 times China’s $9.3 billion.Source: Stanford HAI AI Index Report, 2025
• 88% of organisations now regularly use AI in at least one business function, up from 78% a year earlier — but at the enterprise level, the majority are still experimenting or piloting rather than scaling.Source: McKinsey State of AI, November 2025
• 78% of organisations expect to increase their overall AI spending in the next fiscal year.Source: Deloitte State of Generative AI in the Enterprise, January 2025
• Agentic AI is the next wave: 23% of organisations are already scaling AI agents somewhere in their enterprise and another 39% are experimenting with them — while 26% are exploring autonomous agent development to a large extent.Sources: McKinsey State of AI, November 2025; Deloitte, January 2025

Small Business AI Survey — June 2026

Alongside the verified third-party data on this page, we surveyed 500 small business owners and operators in June 2026 about their real-world AI use, time savings, revenue impact, and concerns. Respondents spanned ecommerce, professional services, technology, and trades. Results are self-reported — and unlike the aggregated statistics above, every figure in this section comes from our own raw data. Journalists can request the full topline and additional cuts at any time.

AI Adoption & Usage

• 37.2% of small businesses surveyed use AI tools regularly — multiple times per week.
• 67.4% use AI in some capacity (regularly or occasionally), with only 7.8% saying they have no plans to adopt it at all.
• 8.2% tried AI tools but stopped — suggesting early friction in onboarding remains a real barrier for a meaningful minority of adopters.
• 56.1% of AI-using small businesses have been using AI tools for over a year, with 20.9% having adopted more than two years ago.

Where Small Businesses Actually Use AI

Respondents could select all areas that applied. Marketing and communication tasks dominate — but ecommerce-specific uses like product descriptions and customer service are also well represented.

Time Savings

• 59.3% of small businesses using AI save 1–6 hours per week — with the largest group (32.5%) saving 1–3 hours weekly.
• 20.6% save 7 or more hours per week, with 8.7% saving more than 10 hours — time equivalent to a part-time employee for the most intensive AI users.
• Only 7.4% said they haven’t measured time savings — suggesting most small business AI users have a concrete sense of the value they’re getting.

Revenue Impact

• 60.3% of AI-using small businesses report a positive revenue impact from AI — 19.0% noticeable, 41.3% slight.
• Only 3.7% say AI has not helped their revenue at all. The majority of non-positive responses are “too early to say” (13.2%) or “no measurable impact yet” (22.8%) — not negative outcomes.

AI Spending

• 83.1% of AI-using small businesses spend $100 or less per month on AI tools — 15.6% use free tools exclusively, 30.7% spend $1–25, and 36.8% spend $26–100.
• 84.4% of AI users pay for at least one AI tool rather than relying on free tiers alone — a shift from free experimentation to budgeted spend.
• Only 4.8% spend more than $300/month, suggesting AI remains highly accessible for small business budgets.

Biggest Concerns

• Accuracy of AI outputs is the top concern, cited by 19.2% of respondents — followed closely by privacy and data security (19.0%) and not knowing which tools to use (18.6%).
• Only 7.0% report no concerns about AI at all — for almost every small business, adoption comes with at least one reservation.
• 16.4% cite lack of time to learn new tools as their biggest barrier — pointing to an education and onboarding gap more than a cost barrier.

Who We Surveyed

40.6% of respondents are solo operators, 31.8% have 2–5 employees, and 27.6% have 6 or more employees. The survey skews toward micro and small businesses — the segment where AI adoption data is most scarce.