Two Thirds of Small Businesses Use AI Now. Most Are Winging It.

Then comes the number that deserves more attention. Seventy percent of owners admit they need more training to use the technology effectively. Thryv's own framing is blunt, warning that fast adoption without skills could turn into a liability.

Look at who answered this survey. Thryv polled owners across construction, professional services, restaurants, retail, and personal services, most with annual revenue between one and two million dollars. These are ordinary businesses, and AI is now ordinary inside them too.

I see the training gap play out weekly. A business owner signs up for three AI tools in a month, connects none of them properly, and ends up with subscriptions doing the digital equivalent of sitting in a drawer. The tool was never the problem. The gap is between buying AI and building it into how the business actually runs: which tasks it handles, who checks the output, and where it connects to the CRM, the inbox, and the calendar.

The businesses getting real value from AI are not the ones with the most tools. They are the ones where somebody sat down and mapped the workflow first. What comes in, what goes out, what can be automated safely, and what still needs a human eye all have to be decided before the software earns its keep. That is operations work, and it is exactly the kind of work that keeps getting postponed when everyone in a busy business is serving clients.

This is where I spend a lot of my time at Rellatech. My CRM and automation services set up the systems that AI tools plug into, and my admin support makes sure someone is actually maintaining them instead of letting them drift.