New figures out this week from Simply Business’s 2026 SME Insights Report, based on a survey of 1,842 UK small businesses, show AI use among small business owners has jumped to 47%, more than double the 22% recorded in the same survey a year ago. A further 13% say they plan to start within the next six to twelve months, which means roughly six in ten UK small businesses are either using AI now or about to.
That’s a genuinely fast shift, and it lines up with what several other surveys have found this year. But buried in the same report is the more interesting number: 44% of small business owners say they’re wary of AI on security and privacy grounds, and 39% simply aren’t sure how it would help them. Adoption is accelerating and hesitation is holding steady, at the same time, in the same businesses.
What SMEs are actually using AI for
Among those already using it, the most common applications are unglamorous and practical: 63% use AI for creating content, 53% for problem solving, and 50% for generating ideas. This tracks with what we see across the ecosystem here, AI is being pulled into UK SMEs mostly through everyday tasks like drafting copy, summarising documents and thinking through a decision, not through some grand digital transformation project. That’s a healthy pattern. Tools adopted because they solve a specific, felt problem tend to stick; tools imposed top-down as a “digital strategy” often don’t.
Why the trust gap matters more than the growth number
The 44% who are wary of security and privacy risks aren’t being paranoid. Plenty of free and consumer-grade AI tools are unclear, or actively unhelpful, about what happens to the data you paste into them, and a business document, customer list or draft contract dropped into the wrong tool can end up used for model training, stored somewhere you don’t control, or simply lost track of. For a small business with no dedicated IT or legal function, that risk is genuinely hard to assess tool by tool.
This is exactly where a lot of the hesitation is rational rather than technophobic. The businesses in that 44% aren’t necessarily the ones falling behind, they’re often the ones asking the right question before the wrong one gets asked for them, usually after something has already gone wrong.
Closing the gap without closing your eyes
The practical fix isn’t “use less AI” or “use more AI”, it’s getting a basic policy in place before adoption happens by accident, one team member at a time, with no one tool doing so under evaluated terms. A short, plain-English AI use policy, covering which tools are approved, what data can and can’t go into them, and who signs off on a new one, closes most of the risk without slowing anyone down. Smallprint has ready-made legal templates for exactly this kind of internal policy if you don’t want to draft one from scratch. And if you’re evaluating AI adoption properly rather than letting it happen by accident, BuildApps works specifically with UK SMEs on rolling out AI tools in a way that doesn’t create a security or compliance headache six months later.
The takeaway: the doubling in AI adoption is real and worth taking seriously, but so is the 44% who haven’t been sold on it yet. Put a simple policy in place now, and the growth and the caution can both be right at the same time.
