Are UK small businesses behind on AI? What the ONS data says
On 17 August 2026 Social Media Examiner published a small-business breakdown of its 2026 AI Marketing Industry Report. It found that 73% of the 681 marketers surveyed use AI every day. Four percent of them live in the United Kingdom. The Office for National Statistics, on a national sample, puts UK firms under ten people at 28%.
Both numbers are real. They measure different things, and only one of them is about you.
What did the 2026 AI Marketing Industry Report find?
It is Social Media Examiner's third annual AI study, published on 31 July and written up for small business owners on 17 August by its founder, Michael Stelzner. It ran in July 2026 and closed with 681 participants.
Seventy-three percent of those marketers use AI every day, up from 37% in 2024, and 90% use it at least weekly. Two findings underneath matter more. Eighty-five percent learn by experimenting on their own, while 7% get training from their employer. And 86% agree AI saves them time, while only 30% can point to significant, measurable results.
Sixty percent of respondents work in businesses of ten people or fewer, which is why Stelzner frames it for small firms: "this isn't enterprise research. This is your world."
Who was actually surveyed?
People on Social Media Examiner's email list. The demographics section says so: participants were recruited from its own community, by email. They subscribe to a marketing publisher, opened an email about AI and chose to answer a survey on it.
That shapes every figure. Nearly a third (31%) work in marketing, PR or advertising. Six in ten are 50 or over. On location, 63% live in the United States, 5% in Canada, 4% in the United Kingdom and 3% in Australia. Four percent of 681 is about 27 people. That is the entire British sample.
What do the UK numbers say?
The ONS released its own analysis on 20 July 2026, drawn from the Business Insights and Conditions Survey. Wave 159 had 38,637 businesses responding, so it is the closest thing the UK has to a national count.
Among businesses with ten or more employees, around 35% report using at least one AI technology, up from around 12% in late 2023. For businesses with nought to nine employees the figure is 28%, and for those with 250 or more it is 49%.
Depth reverses it. Of the businesses that use AI, 10% say they use it extensively. Split by size, 17% of firms with nought to nine employees say so, against 9% of firms with 250 or more. The smallest firms that adopt use it harder than the largest ones do.
Two caveats from the ONS itself. The extent-of-use questions are new to this wave and it calls the answers early indications. Its framing sentence restricts to firms of ten or more while the breakdown includes the smallest band.
So are UK small businesses behind on AI?
Behind what, is the honest answer. The 73% figure describes daily personal use by marketers who chose to answer a survey about AI. The 28% figure describes whether a business reports using at least one AI technology, asked of a national sample that includes plumbers, printers and haulage firms. A one-person consultancy using ChatGPT every morning counts in one and might not count in the other.
The ONS is blunt about what its number contains: "AI adoption to date has been relatively shallow among UK businesses with 10 or more employees". The average adopting firm used 1.4 AI technologies in late 2023 and uses 1.6 now. Most are running a normal business with a chatbot in it.
The comparison worth making is against your own firm three months ago, the reasoning behind measuring your own posting results rather than copying a benchmark.
What does this look like for a twelve-person firm?
Take a twelve-person recruitment firm in Guildford whose office manager uses the free tier of ChatGPT twice a week to redraft job adverts and tidy candidate summaries.
On Social Media Examiner's scale she is in the 17% who use AI weekly, not the 73% who use it daily. On the ONS scale her firm is one of the 28%, and because that redrafting covers most of the writing the firm does, it plausibly sits in the 17% reporting extensive use. Two surveys, three brackets, one unchanged business. The question worth answering is whether the adverts pull more applications than they did in April.
Do you have to pay to keep up?
Not to start. Social Media Examiner found 85% of its respondents pay for AI tools, though it does not publish what they spend. The ONS found free-to-use software is one of the two most common UK routes into AI, and that 41% of firms with ten or more employees report no barriers to adoption at all.
What to ignore
Ignore any headline percentage as a verdict on your business, including both of the ones above. The ONS puts the range in writing: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis research has 36% of UK workers using AI for their job, while National Bureau of Economic Research figures put 71% of UK firms using at least one AI technology. Same country, same year, and the ONS business measure sits at 35%. Anyone quoting one of them to sell you something has picked the flattering one.
What to do this week
Count your own use. One line per person: the task, the time it took, the time it used to take. Four weeks of that puts you ahead of the 70% of surveyed marketers who cannot show measurable results.
Name an owner. Fifty-five percent of those marketers said they personally own AI adoption at their company and 10% said nobody had been assigned. Write a name against it and protect an hour a week.
Try one video job. Ninety-five percent of the surveyed marketers use AI for written content and 37% use it for video, while 74% want to learn it. That is the biggest gap in the report, and text is the more crowded option now that platforms are policing machine-written posts, as LinkedIn's AI slop report button shows.
Common questions
Is it true that 73% of marketers use AI every day?
It is true of the people surveyed. Social Media Examiner's 2026 AI Marketing Industry Report asked 681 marketers recruited by email from its own community in July 2026, and 73% said they use AI daily. That is a self-selected sample, not a population estimate.
How many UK small businesses use AI?
The Office for National Statistics, in analysis released on 20 July 2026, puts 28% of UK businesses with nought to nine employees as using at least one AI technology. Around 35% of firms with ten or more do, and 49% of those with 250 or more.
What should a small business measure to prove AI is working?
Time on one recurring task. Log how long it takes with AI and estimate how long it took before, for four weeks. In Social Media Examiner's survey only 30% of marketers could point to significant measurable results, so a simple log puts you ahead of most.
Where Lahat fits
Video is the first thing a twelve-person team stops making when the week gets busy. We build content and social programmes for UK SMEs that keep running whether or not anyone has an hour spare. Lahat Creative is a full-service marketing, PR, content, social and events agency in Guildford, named PR Agency of the Year 2025/26 at the Corporate LiveWire Global Awards.
