350 small business owners across the U.S., spanning every level of AI experience.
Six chapters mapping where small business AI stands today, and where it's headed next.
Adoption is recent for most. The experience curve, where revenue impact compounds, is still ahead of them.
Most small business AI today runs through a single general-purpose chat interface. The owner is the integration layer.
Owners see AI as a front-office growth lever. Marketing dominates, followed by sales and core operations. Customer support sits last.
N=350. Ordered by mean stack-rank relevance, where owners ranked each area from 1 (most relevant) to 7 (least relevant).
Knowledge gaps and relevance top the list. Far fewer owners point to cost or complexity as their main obstacle.
Base: N=350 | Q17: Multi-select; percentages do not sum to 100%
On a 1–10 scale, only 20% of owners rate themselves an 8, 9, or 10 in their effective use of AI. 28% sit at three or below. The largest cluster sits in the middle, using AI regularly but unsure whether they are using it well.
Businesses with higher AI confidence are nearly 3X more likely to report revenue gains from AI, with positive impact rising from 23% among low-confidence owners to 65% among high-confidence owners.
Most owners land in the low-to-medium trust bands. High trust is rare.
Self-ranked level of AI trust on a score of 1–10. 1 is low, 10 is high.
Output quality and losing the human touch account for 61% of all concerns cited, more than six times the share citing cost or complexity.
One in five report a full workday or more reclaimed.
The time-savings story lands now. The revenue story is the next chapter, and it's still being written.
Businesses with more than two years of AI experience are roughly 2X more likely to report positive revenue impact than those in their first three months, rising from 27% to 55%.
Earlier-stage businesses are seeing slightly more immediate ROI, but the variation by age is modest. Time spent practicing with AI matters more than years in business.
Most have heard of it but have not acted.
When asked how they'd respond if a competitor showed up first in AI search results, 47% said they'd treat it as a top priority. 78% want to see how competitors appear in AI-generated results.
Roughly 34% of owners say their website has become more important since they started using AI. Only 4% say it has become less important.
79% of owners are aware of AI agents. Only 16% have deployed one. The adoption gap is wide.
Owners would deploy agents for marketing, sales, and operations well ahead of customer support, a clear front-office growth signal.
N=350. Ordered by mean stack-rank priority, where owners ranked each task from 1 (would deploy first) to 7 (would deploy last).
We believe the new era of AI offers an extraordinary opportunity for small businesses to succeed online without the resource constraints that previously held many back. We set out to understand where confidence with AI stands today and what small businesses need most.
We partnered with ListenLabs to interview 350 small business owners across every level of AI experience, asking about adoption, mastery, trust, ROI, AI search visibility, and the agentic AI wave on the horizon. We learned a lot.
A year ago, the small business AI story was purely about adoption. That is no longer the conversation. Today, 87% use at least one AI tool and a majority pay for one, yet only 20% describe themselves as highly confident. Most striking was how closely an owner's self-rated confidence tracked with their reported results: high-confidence owners were nearly 3X as likely to report revenue gains from AI as low-confidence owners.
The majority of owners not yet experiencing AI-accelerated growth were eager to know what to use, when to trust it, and how to make it actually work for their business.
The State of Small Business AI Confidence 2026 marks our first annual report. Given that SMBs account for 99.9% of all American businesses, employ roughly 45.9% of the private-sector workforce, and generate approximately 43.5% of total U.S. GDP, the potential impact of AI on small business could be a true tailwind for the American economy. We look forward to seeing how SMB AI adoption and confidence shift through 2027.
Bluehost partnered with ListenLabs to conduct an online quantitative and qualitative study of 350 U.S. small business owners in May 2026. Participants owned businesses with 1–50 employees across a wide range of industries, including retail, professional services, local services, health and wellness, technology, nonprofit, media, restaurant, hospitality, and more. Respondents ranged from business owners who had never used AI to those using it multiple times per day. The survey explored six core topics: AI adoption, self-rated confidence and mastery, trust in AI for customer-facing work, time and revenue return on investment, awareness and readiness for AI search, and appetite for agentic AI.
The margin of error for the full sample is ±5.2 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. Margins of error are larger for subgroup analyses and vary by subgroup size. In some instances, percentages may not total 100% due to rounding.
350 owners spanning every level of AI experience, from never-users to daily power users.
Confidence scores referenced in this report reflect respondents' self-reported ratings on a 1–10 scale, where 1 means "not confident at all" and 10 means "completely confident," in response to the question: "How confident are you that you are using AI effectively in your business?" For analyses comparing confidence by usage frequency, average confidence was calculated as the mean score within each AI usage group, based on responses ranging from Never to Multiple times per day. For analyses comparing confidence by AI tenure, average confidence was calculated as the mean score within each group based on how long respondents reported using AI tools in their business, ranging from less than 3 months to more than 2 years. These comparisons should be interpreted as cross-sectional differences between groups at one point in time, not as proof that longer AI use directly causes higher confidence.
Six chapters that cover the full arc of small business AI in 2026 — from adoption and confidence to the agentic wave on the horizon.
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