Wiregrass AI

Workflow automation

Most small businesses now use AI. Few have put it to work

Census, U.S. Chamber, and Fed data show AI use climbing fast, but most businesses haven’t changed how they work. Where the payoff is, and how to start.

By Wiregrass AI4 min read

Depending on which survey you read, somewhere between a quarter and two-thirds of American small businesses now use AI. The more telling number is how few have changed the way they work because of it.

That gap is where the opportunity is, for any business willing to go a step past the chatbot.

How many businesses use AI

  • U.S. Chamber of Commerce (October 2): 66% of small businesses use AI, up 8 points from 2025 and nearly three times the 23% of 2023. Businesses using AI were “at least 7 points more likely to report sales, profit, and workforce growth” than those that weren’t.
  • Ramp (September): 50% of the small businesses on Ramp’s spending platform paid for an AI product or service in September, up from about 39% a year earlier.
  • Census Bureau (October 8): 23.8% of U.S. businesses used AI in a business function in the two weeks before they answered the survey, which ran from September 21 to October 4, and 27.7% expect to within six months. Alabama’s estimate was 20.9%, though state figures move around from one survey to the next.

Why the spread? The questions differ. The Chamber asks whether a business uses AI at all; the Census asks whether it used AI in a business function in the past two weeks. Either way, the direction is clear.

Few have changed how they work

In a supplemental survey that began in November 2025, the Census Bureau asked businesses that use AI what they changed in order to use it. 64.3% made no changes at all. About 15% developed new workflows, about 15% trained their staff, and just 3.8% brought in vendors or consultants to install or connect AI.

What are employees using it for? At businesses whose staff use generative AI, the top tasks were writing and editing (85.4%), looking up information (49.9%), and summarizing documents (44.6%). Paperwork and filing came in at 34.7%, and customer support at 15.5%.

In other words, most business AI today is a person with a chatbot window open. That’s useful, but it’s the smallest part of what AI can do, because the work around it hasn’t changed. The invoice still gets retyped into accounting, the intake form still gets copied into the CRM, and the weekly report is still built by hand.

AI is changing jobs more than cutting them

If you’re wondering what AI means for your staff, the data so far is reassuring:

  • In the New York Fed’s regional business surveys, 61% of service firms and 51% of manufacturers now use AI. Only 4% of service firms laid anyone off because of AI, and existing workers were “much more likely to be retrained than replaced.”
  • In the Census supplement, 95.7% of businesses using AI saw no change in their total employment. They were more than four times as likely to use AI to help an employee with a task (43.7%) as to have it take over a task an employee used to do (10.1%).
  • In the Chamber’s survey, 47% of small businesses said AI is creating jobs today.

Where the payoff is

The businesses getting the most from AI connect it to the work itself. A few common first steps:

  • Paperwork in, data out. Read invoices, orders, and forms, check the details, and enter them where they belong.
  • Systems that stay in step. Stop retyping the same customer into your CRM, accounting, and scheduling software.
  • Requests that sort themselves. Triage incoming email and requests, draft replies, and route each one to the right person.
  • Reports that build themselves. Pull the week’s numbers together, with a plain-language note on what changed.

None of these replace anyone. They take the retyping and copy-pasting off people’s plates, which is exactly the kind of change the data shows businesses making.

How to start

  1. List the tasks that eat hours every week. Ask your team; they know.
  2. Pick one with clear inputs and outputs, like a form that becomes a record.
  3. Automate it with checks, so anything unusual goes to a person instead of slipping through.
  4. Measure the time saved, then do the next one.

That’s how our workflow automation work begins: with the people who do the job, and one task worth automating. If you’re not sure where to start, a free strategy call is a good first step.

Sources

More from the blog

All posts

Get in touch

Tell us a little about yourself and we’ll get back to you.

We use your details as our privacy policy describes.