The Census Bureau says 1 in 5 businesses use AI. The Chamber of Commerce says 6 in 10. Both are right, and the gap is your opening.

What each number counts

The Census question is narrow: did your business use AI in the last two weeks to produce the goods or services it sells? An owner who asked a free chatbot to fix an email does not count. A shop whose phone is answered by an AI assistant does.

The Chamber question is broad: does your business use AI? Almost anything counts, and the people who answer trade-group surveys skew toward the people who are interested in the topic.

So the honest reading is this. Most small business owners have tried AI. Roughly one in five have put it to work inside the business itself.

The size gap

The Census data breaks out by company size, and the pattern is stark.

• 01Companies with 250 or more employees: 37 percent use AI.
• 02Companies with 100 to 249 employees: 32 percent.
• 03Companies with fewer than 20 employees: under 20 percent, and the number did not move between December and May.
• 04Retail: about 14 percent, the lowest of the major sectors. Information and finance lead at 40 and 34 percent.

Why the small firms are flat

Big companies have someone whose job is to try this. A small company has an owner whose job is everything. The tools that count for the Census question, the ones that produce the service, are things like an assistant that answers the phone, a system that takes orders, software that writes the quote. Those have to be set up, connected to your calendar or your register, and taught your rules. A free chat window does none of that on its own.

The Federal Reserve made the same point in April with a different pair of numbers. About 18 percent of firms have adopted AI, but 78 percent of workers are employed at a firm that has. The adoption is concentrated in large employers. Small firms are where the room is.

What the honest number means for you

If you run a shop, a practice, a restaurant or a service business, here is what to do with this.

• Stop measuring yourself against the 58 percent. Your actual competitors are in the 14 to 20 percent group, and most of them have not started.
• Aim for the Census definition, not the Chamber one. Put the technology where it produces the service: in front of the customer, answering, booking, taking the order.
• Start with the task you lose money on today. A missed call, an order that needs a callback, a quote that takes a week. One working system beats five tools nobody opened twice.

The caveat

The Census survey is the most careful measurement we have, but it is still self-reported and its AI question changed wording in late 2025, so do not read a one-point move as news. The direction across every source agrees: large companies are moving, small companies mostly are not yet, and the ones who move first in a local market will not have much company.