Goldman Sachs survey: 86% of small businesses use AI, but…

A survey of 2,473 Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses graduates, released alongside a $500 million Small Business AI Institute launch, finds overwhelming adoption — but only 18% use agentic AI and under 30% deploy it to reach customers.

Goldman Sachs published its third annual AI survey of 10,000 Small Businesses graduates on October 22, and the headline number is both impressive and misleading: 86% of the 2,473 owners polled now use AI, up from 77% in 2025 and 56% in 2024. Alongside the report, titled The AI Economy Is a Small Business Economy, Goldman committed $500 million to launch a Small Business AI Institute with Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI.

The adoption curve is steep. The integration curve is flat.

Only 15% of owners describe AI as fully integrated into core operations, and only 18% use agentic AI. 82% say AI isn’t yet central to the business. 73% of users spend under $100 a month; 16% use only free tools. The dominant interface, cited by 86%, is a standalone chatbot (ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini), with 54% using features embedded in software like QuickBooks AI Agents or Microsoft 365 Copilot, 19% using coding tools, and 12% running custom builds.

Where owners deploy AI tells the real story. Financial analysis and planning jumped from 18% in 2024 to 42%. Data analysis climbed from 26% to 42%. Written marketing content slipped from 74% to 65%. Productivity sits at 66%, strategy at 55%, new products at 51%. Sales trails at 38% for service businesses and 47% for product. Customer acquisition is the use case graduates have most conspicuously left on the table.

The geographic split sharpens it. Just 23% of rural owners use AI to target or reach customers at all. CRM usage runs 16% rural versus 28% non-rural. 47% of rural owners cite lack of technical expertise as a barrier, against 39% elsewhere. 77% of respondents say they’d benefit from more training; 74% have no formal policy governing employee use.

Workforce effects are muted: 84% of AI-using graduates reported no staffing change, 5% added, 6% cut. Time saved flows to strategic planning (56%), expanded marketing (44%), and new products (31%).

CEO David Solomon, speaking at the launch covered by Fortune, offered a candid framing of the institute’s bet: “there’s very little that we do where we need frontier models,” and “the important thing is to get it right, not to get it quicker.” Anthropic co-founder and president Daniela Amodei framed the stakes differently: “AI is the first technology that can finally close that gap, and Anthropic is committed to making sure those gains reach startups and family businesses, not just large enterprises.”

Since 2010, nearly 20,000 entrepreneurs have passed through the program, generating over $32 billion in annual revenue and more than 350,000 jobs. Roughly 20,000 owners and employees will receive the Grow with Google AI Professional certificate and three months of free Google AI Pro access; Meta is contributing Muse for Small Business. The scaffolding is suddenly enormous. What it’s scaffolding is the second-order problem: a cohort that has adopted the technology and not yet pointed it at growth.

Goldman Sachs survey: 86% of small businesses use AI, but almost none use it to get customers

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