Half of UK small businesses say they use AI now. That sounds like good news until you look at what “using AI” actually means for most of them.

I run JoeAI, an AI consultancy in Crouch End, North London. Part of my job is reading through AI news so my clients do not have to. Most of it is noise. But three things happened this month that genuinely affect small businesses, starting with the gap hiding inside that 54 per cent figure. Here is what I think matters, and what I think you can ignore.

The 54 per cent number everyone is sharing hides the real story

The British Chambers of Commerce found that 54 per cent of UK firms are now actively using AI. That is up from 35 per cent last year and 23 per cent the year before. On the surface, that sounds like most small businesses have sorted this out.

They have not. Buried further into the same research is a smaller, more honest number: only 11 per cent of SMEs use AI extensively to automate how they actually operate. The other 43 per cent are mostly typing things into ChatGPT now and again. That is not nothing. But it is a long way from AI actually changing how a business runs.

This matches what I see locally. Plenty of business owners have used AI for something. Far fewer have built it into how they work day to day. There is a real difference between having tried a tool once and having a tool that quietly saves you hours every week.

If you are in the 43 per cent rather than the 11 per cent, you are not behind. You are normal. The honest next step is not “do more AI.” It is picking the one task that eats the most time in your week and fixing that, properly, before touching anything else.

London just put £12 million behind small business AI adoption

The Mayor of London announced a £12 million programme at London Tech Week to help small businesses adopt AI. £4 million a year for three years. Free AI readiness assessments, mentoring, and workshops, run through London & Partners.

The number that made me stop was this one: only 16 per cent of London SMEs currently use AI tools, despite nearly two thirds saying it will be critical to staying competitive over the next five years. That gap between “we know we should” and “we have not done it” is exactly where I spend most of my working week, sitting with business owners who know AI matters but have no idea where to start.

If you run a small business in London, this is worth ten minutes of your time to look into. Free expert support funded by City Hall, with nobody trying to sell you software, is rare enough to take seriously.

My honest take: programmes like this are usually better at raising awareness than at getting businesses past the first step. Knowing AI matters and actually using it well are two different things. That gap is exactly what the 54 per cent number above is hiding.

Google’s AI answers are starting to decide who gets found, not just how you rank

This is the one I think most local businesses are sleeping on. Google’s AI Overviews, plus tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity, are increasingly the first place people look before they ever see a normal search results page. For local searches in particular, that changes the game.

The old rules of SEO have not disappeared. But they are no longer the whole story. Being correctly and consistently described across your website, your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and the places people talk about you online matters more now, because that is the raw material AI tools pull from when they decide who to mention.

I wrote about this in more depth a little while back, because I think it is the quiet shift most local businesses have not clocked yet. If your business has not been mentioned, or has been mentioned wrong, in an AI answer recently, that is worth checking. Not panicking about. Checking.

So what should you actually do with this

Not all three of these. One.

If you have dabbled with AI but never gone deeper, pick the one task in your week that takes the most time and is the most boring, and find out if AI can take it off your plate. If you run a business in London and have not touched AI at all, look at the Mayor’s programme. If your business depends on people finding you online, spend twenty minutes checking how AI tools currently describe you.

That is genuinely it. Small, deliberate steps beat trying to keep up with everything.

If you want to talk through what any of this means for your specific business, I run free AI workshops for North London professionals, and a £75 introductory consultation if you would rather go one to one. No jargon, no hard sell.

Get in touch here or email joe@joeai.co.uk.