The Honest Number

Government and bank data next to the headline surveys: where small businesses really are with AI, by size, refreshed quarterly.

About one in four. Not three in four.

Owner surveys say 58% to 77% of small businesses use AI. Government data and bank records put it between about one in eight and one in four, depending on what gets counted, and businesses your size sit right in the middle of that.

What the measured data says

This isn't a poll of people who already like AI. Every two weeks the Census Bureau asks a sample of businesses, built to match the real mix of the country, one plain question: in the last two weeks, did this business use AI in any of its business functions? In the round collected September 21 to October 4, 2026, 23.8% said yes.

That number is moving, but slowly. It was 17.3% when Census first asked the question this way in November 2025.

Money tells a similar story. Chase looked at its small-business bank accounts and found 17.7% had paid for an AI tool by the end of 2025. QuickBooks payment records put the share that paid for dedicated AI tools between 2021 and 2025 at 12%.

Payment records miss free tools, so they run low on purpose. Treat them as a floor, not the whole picture.

Why the surveys are higher

The big numbers — 58%, 66%, 76%, 77% — come from owner surveys run by banks, software companies and business groups. They aren't lies. They ask different people a different question.

The Federal Reserve looked at why the estimates split this far apart. The main reason is who gets asked: the Census sample looks like the real country, which is mostly very small firms, while other surveys lean toward bigger employers. Wording matters too — when Census widened its own question in late 2025 from "producing goods or services" to "any of its business functions," reported use rose by 47% to 159%, depending on the industry.

Some samples come with a lean built in. Goldman Sachs surveyed people who went through its own small-business program. Intuit counts any kind of AI use, from free tools and built-in features to paid subscriptions, so a feature that came switched on inside your software can count as a yes.

What "using AI" actually means

Read the question before you read the number. "Used AI in any business function in the last two weeks" is a specific, recent act. "Uses AI regularly" or "integrated AI in the past five years" can cover someone who tried a chatbot once for a Facebook post.

The gap between trying and relying is the real story. In the same Goldman survey where 76% said they use AI, 14% said it is fully embedded in their core operations. Most of the yes answers are experiments, not systems.

And 9.7% of businesses in the Census round collected September 7-20 answered "do not know." Even the people filling out the government form aren't always sure what counts.

Where businesses your size are

Census breaks the same question out by headcount. In the round collected September 21 to October 4, 2026, firms with 1-4 employees were at 23.9%, 5-9 at 21.5%, 10-19 at 22.4% and 20-49 at 24.8%. Under 50 people, it's roughly one business in four.

It climbs from there: 29.2% at 50-99, 36.4% at 100-249 and 36.5% at 250 and up. Bigger firms tend to have IT staff, budget and someone whose job is to try new things. That's a head start, not a verdict on you.

Look at the other side of the number too. About three in four businesses your size didn't say yes to using AI in the last two weeks. You are not behind — you are in the middle of the pack.

What to do with that

Feeling behind makes people buy things. A subscription, a course, a consultant, the tool a salesman swore by. None of that is the move.

Pick one task that eats your week — quotes, invoices, the same five emails — and try AI on that one thing for a month. Check its work every time. Keep it if it saves you time, drop it if it doesn't.

One task that actually runs on AI puts you further along than a lot of the yes answers in the big surveys. Then, and only then, pick the next one.

How we keep this updated

We refresh this page every quarter. Census publishes a new AI number every two weeks, so each update uses the latest round and says which one. The next update is due January 1, 2027.

We don't round, blend or average numbers across sources. Every figure here links to where it came from and says what was actually asked. If a number ever rests on a single secondary source, we mark it reported.