Valentina Akpan: Founder, Rellatech. Admin and technical virtual assistant for businesses and startups with teams.
Goldman Sachs surveyed 10,000 small businesses through its 10,000 Small Businesses program and found that three quarters of them are now using AI in some form, 84 percent of those users report productivity gains, and only 14 percent said they had truly integrated AI into their core operations. A separate NFIB survey put overall small business AI usage closer to a quarter, likely because it captured more of the very small and traditional firms that the Goldman sample skips.
Whichever number you trust, the gap is the interesting part, because most people who tried AI liked it and almost nobody has it doing real work inside their business.
Why the gap exists
Opening ChatGPT and pasting an email into it is not integration. Integration is when a lead fills out a form, the CRM tags them, an AI drafts a personalised follow-up in your voice, a human reviews it, and it goes out from your domain, all without you touching it. That takes wiring and a clean CRM. It takes someone who understands both the tools and how your business actually runs.
Most small business owners do not have time to sit down for a week and figure that out, so the AI stays in a browser tab, useful for drafting things, and never touches the parts of the business that would really save 10 hours a week.
Where the 14 percent are winning
The businesses in the small integrated group tend to have two things in common. First, someone in the business manages the systems, not just the strategy. Second, the data underneath is clean enough for the AI to be trusted with it. Both of those are boring, unglamorous problems, and both are fixable.
This is the exact space I work in as a CRM and automation specialist. I clean up the CRM, connect it to the tools you already pay for, set up the automations that only fire when the data is right, and supervise them so they keep working.
The plain version of the answer
You do not need more AI tools, because you almost certainly already pay for enough of them, and what most small businesses need is one person whose job is to wire those tools into the workflows that really matter and then keep an eye on them. That is where the 84 percent productivity number stops being a survey answer and starts being a P&L line.
Work with Rellatech
If you have the tools and the ambition but nobody to connect them, that connective work is a regular part of what I do. See how the retainers are structured, or a short call is the fastest way to see whether it's a fit.
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