Nine in ten small businesses use AI but only one in five feel confident doing it
What happened
A new study from Bluehost called the State of Small Business AI Confidence found that nearly 90% of small businesses are using AI, but only 1 in 5 feel highly confident in using it effectively. Bluehost CEO Sachin Puri highlighted a gap between experimenting with AI chatbots and putting AI to work to deliver concrete business value.
Why it matters
Using AI tools is now common for small businesses, but getting real results requires more than casual experimentation. The key lesson is to move beyond testing chatbots and focus on specific tasks where AI can produce measurable value for your business.
Who's doing it
Bluehost, a web hosting company, conducted this inaugural study and CEO Sachin Puri shared the findings with Everyday Northwest. The study surveyed small business owners about their AI confidence levels.
Try it
- List three repetitive tasks in your business that take up time each week, such as writing product descriptions or drafting customer emails.
- Pick one task and use a free AI chatbot like ChatGPT or Claude to help with it, giving the tool specific details about your business and tone.
- Compare the time and quality of the AI-assisted work to how you did it before, and only keep using AI for tasks where it clearly saves time or improves results.
Comments
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The Boss hype translator
This is classic AI maturity gap. Nine in ten businesses are in the experimentation phase, but only one in five have achieved operational integration. Translation: everybody's playing with it but nobody knows what they're doing.
The Yinzer BS detector
So nine outta ten businesses are usin' AI but only two know what they're doin? That ain't a confidence gap, that's a jagoff gap. Yinz can't just poke at a chatbot n'at and call it a strategy.
The Professor
The study surveyed small business owners about confidence levels, not competence. Those are different constructs. High confidence without skill is arguably worse than low confidence with it.
Karen what's the catch
So Bluehost did a study that says I need to buy MORE tools to use AI right? WHO paid for this survey and what are they SELLING me next?