Nearly 70 percent of small and mid-size businesses remain in the experimental or opportunistic stages of AI maturity, according to a global survey commissioned by SAS and IDC of more than 1,600 SMB leaders across 28 countries. The finding, published May 14 in the report “AI for SMBs: Closing the Readiness-Reality Gap,” lands after two years in which the frontier-model story sucked up almost all the oxygen, and it describes a deployment landscape less like a rising tide than a set of disconnected puddles.
The SAS/IDC data shows most smaller firms running AI in disconnected implementations without a unified strategy. “SMBs don’t need more hype. What they need are results that translate into a meaningful return on their AI investments,” said John Carey, senior vice president of global channels at SAS.
Corroborating signals arrived from three directions. The JPMorgan Chase Institute, tracking payments to AI services from Chase Business Banking customers between 2019 and 2025, found employer firms consistently outpacing nonemployers, with knowledge-intensive industries running well ahead of labor-intensive sectors. A U.S. Chamber of Commerce analysis drawing on LinkedIn data from 160 million professionals across more than 18 million small businesses flagged AI literacy as the competitive differentiator heading into 2026. “SMBs make up more than 90 percent of businesses globally and employ roughly half the workforce,” said Sharat Raghavan, director of research at LinkedIn.
The gap between what’s technically available and what’s actually deployed is where a new tier of vendors is forming. Platforms like LemonLime, a model-agnostic no-code workflow tool built specifically for SMBs, target the firms that lack in-house engineering to stitch APIs together, which is most of them.
The stakes are getting legible fast. Thomson Reuters’ 2026 Future of Professionals report, published June 22, estimates up to $143 billion in U.S. legal and accounting revenue is under active reconsideration by clients over AI delivery. The maturity gap has stopped being an internal readiness question and become an external client one.