By Gaynor Duthie, Managing Partner
AI adoption is rising, but confidence is not evenly spread.
That gap matters, particularly for SMEs. The businesses most likely to benefit from AI are not necessarily the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones with leaders who can make informed decisions, bring people with them and create enough structure for experimentation to become improvement.
The evidence points to a growing readiness issue. British Chambers of Commerce research shows that AI adoption among UK firms has risen sharply to 54%, but that adoption remains uneven by firm size and sector. Larger SMEs and B2B professional services firms are ahead, while smaller firms, consumer-facing businesses and manufacturers are slower to adopt.
That creates a risk. AI could become another area where better-resourced businesses move faster, while smaller businesses fall behind because they are unsure where to start.
The Institute of Coding has highlighted a similar divide. In a 2025 survey of 500 SME leaders, 52% identified lack of internal skills and knowledge as the biggest barrier to adopting AI. Only 12% had invested in AI-related training for staff, despite 51% agreeing that AI will play a critical role in the future of business.
This is not only a skills issue. It is a leadership issue.
Leaders are being asked to make decisions in an area that is moving quickly, full of hype and not always easy to assess. They need to understand enough to identify good use cases, ask better questions of suppliers, protect customer and business data, support their teams and judge whether the benefits are worth the time invested.
The UK Government’s AI Skills for Life and Work report makes this point clearly. It states that workplace AI skills rely on understanding risks, keeping information safe, judging the reliability of outputs and discerning what is AI-generated. It also notes that business leaders face challenges identifying viable AI use cases and navigating the legal, regulatory and ethical implications of implementation. That is why leadership confidence cannot be left to chance.
For SMEs, the next phase of AI adoption should be more structured, but still practical. Leaders do not need to become technical experts. They do need a working understanding of what AI can and cannot do, where it fits their business, how to manage risk and how to build confidence across the team.
A sensible starting point is to create a small AI working group, agree simple usage principles and identify three to five areas where AI could improve efficiency or quality. Then test, measure and refine. Keep the focus close to the work people already do.
The tone from leadership is important too. If AI is presented as a threat, people will resist it. If it is presented as a shortcut, quality will suffer. If it is presented as a tool that needs judgement, training and ownership, people are more likely to use it well.
The next AI advantage for SMEs will not come from chasing every new tool. It will come from leaders who are curious, calm and commercially focused enough to turn uncertainty into useful action.
AI can speed up marketing, but judgement still does the real work
Marketing teams are under pressure to move faster, produce more and prove value more clearly. AI has arrived at exactly the right time to help with some of that pressure.
It can draft, summarise, analyse, repurpose and structure. It can help a team get from a blank page to a first version more quickly. For SMEs with limited marketing resource, that can be genuinely useful. But faster marketing is not automatically better marketing.
HubSpot’s 2026 State of Marketing report found that 42.5% of marketers use AI extensively for content creation, and 26.5% say AI has significantly increased productivity. It also found that 62.7% believe more unique, human-centred content is needed to compete with AI-generated content. That is the tension.
AI can help businesses say more. It does not guarantee that what they say will be more distinctive, more credible or more useful to the customer. In fact, it can easily pull brands towards the middle, because many tools are trained to create plausible, polished and broadly acceptable content.
For marketing, the middle is dangerous. Customers are already surrounded by content that sounds fine. The businesses that stand out are the ones with a clear point of view, a strong understanding of their customer, proof behind their claims and a tone that feels recognisably theirs.
The role of human judgement becomes more important in that environment, not less.
Microsoft’s 2026 Work Trend Index found that 86% of AI users treat AI output as a starting point rather than a final answer. The same research found that users see quality control and critical thinking as two of the most important human skills as AI takes on more work.
That is particularly relevant for brand and marketing. A marketing team using AI well still needs to decide what matters, what is true, what is useful, what should be left out and what the audience is ready to hear. It needs to recognise when a line sounds generic, when a claim is too broad, when a message lacks evidence or when a piece of content is polished but empty.
There is also a bigger shift happening around discovery. Deloitte has noted that generative AI is changing how organisations are found, evaluated and compared, with visibility increasingly shaped by whether a brand’s information can be interpreted and trusted across a wider ecosystem. That makes clarity, consistency and credibility even more valuable.
For SMEs, the opportunity is to use AI to improve the marketing process without diluting the thinking. Use it to speed up research, generate routes, structure drafts, interrogate messaging and create variations. Then bring in the judgement that only people close to the business can provide.
The best use of AI in marketing is not to remove the human voice. It is to give good marketers more space to think, challenge and sharpen the work.
