AI Adoption for SMEs: The Real Reason Businesses Aren't Moving Faster

New research from Enterpryze and Agile Executive, conducted across our customer and partner community and the wider SME sector, reveals where businesses really stand on AI. The findings might surprise you.

Everyone has a theory about why SMEs aren't moving faster on AI.

It's too expensive. The ROI isn't clear. The technology isn't ready yet.

We wanted to stop guessing. So we asked.

We surveyed our customers, partners, and the wider SME community - and what came back challenges almost every assumption in this conversation.

The Biggest Barrier to AI Adoption for SMEs Isn't Cost. It's Know-How.

A third of respondents (33.3%) said their biggest barrier to AI adoption is a lack of expertise. Not cost. Not unclear ROI. Not time. Knowledge.

For context, only 14.8% cited cost or unclear return as their main blocker. That's less than half the number pointing to skills.

This matters more than it might seem. Because if the problem is money, you throw money at it. But if the problem is expertise, throwing money at it doesn't work. You need something different - better tools, clearer guidance, and technology that actually makes sense to the people using it.

Morgan Browne, founder and CEO of Enterpryze, spoke about exactly this in a recent interview on the Irish Tech News Podcast. In the episode, Morgan sits down with Ronan Leonard from Irish Tech News to talk about his background, the story behind Enterpryze, and what AI actually means for SMEs right now.

His take on the skills gap is worth sitting with: "We're trying to create problems to solve instead of actually looking at where AI could deliver some real value."

That's the trap a lot of businesses fall into. They hear the buzz, feel the pressure to act, and reach for tools before they've identified what problem they're actually trying to fix.

🎙️ Listen to the full interview  Morgan Browne on AI, ERP, and what SMEs actually need - Irish Tech News Podcast

Most SMEs are still finding their feet

Only 18.5% of respondents said AI is already core to how they work. The other 74%? Still exploring, still testing, or not yet started.

That's not a failure. It's honest. Smaller businesses don't have the luxury of failed experiments. When something doesn't work, there's no large IT department to absorb the cost. So they move carefully - which makes sense.

But here's the reality: the next 12 to 24 months will define which businesses get ahead and which ones fall behind. The window for taking your time is getting smaller.

Four in ten businesses don't know how to fund AI

Even among businesses that are ready to move, 40.7% said they haven't accessed any support and would need guidance to do so.

That's four in ten businesses, ready to act, with no clear path forward.

The good news is that support does exist. Grants and funding opportunities for digital adoption are available to Irish SMEs right now - most businesses just don't know where to start or what they qualify for.

That's exactly where our research partner Agile Executive comes in. They work with SMEs to identify the right grants, navigate the application process, and make sure businesses aren't leaving money on the table. If you're unsure whether your business qualifies for funding to support AI or digital adoption, their free grant audit is a good first step - no commitment, just clarity on what's available to you.

Check your grant eligibility with Agile Executive

What SMEs actually want from AI

Here's what surprised us: SMEs aren't chasing AI for the sake of it.

Nearly half (44.4%) said their number one goal from AI is efficiency and cost savings. Growth and innovation came second at 33.3%.

Business owners want to stop wasting time. They want to reduce errors. They want to do more with the team they already have. They're not interested in transformation for its own sake - they want to see it in their bottom line.

That's important for any vendor in this space to hear.

The skills gap has another side to it

Here's something the data points to, but doesn't say outright.

Yes, SMEs are lacking AI skills. But that's only part of the story.

The other part? A lot of the AI tools on the market weren't built for SMEs in the first place. Many were built to demonstrate what the technology can do - not to solve the specific, practical problems that a growing business faces every day.

There's also a layer that doesn't get talked about enough: data quality.

Morgan flagged this directly in his podcast interview. "If your data isn't good, then your AI isn't going to work," he said. "If you're not tracking your landed costs against particular inventory items, it's not going to give you the right data. And then all of a sudden you're making business decisions that are wrong."  That's a real risk - and one that rarely makes it into the vendor brochure.

The question that should drive every AI product decision is simple: what problem does this business actually have, and does this solve it?

At Enterpryze, that's the bar our AI features are held to. From OCR and Invoice Scanning that reads supplier invoices in 36 languages and eliminates manual data entry, to Expense Management that pulls data from scanned receipts in real time, to Banking and Reconciliation that auto-suggests transaction matches, to Predictive Reordering that uses purchasing history to automatically generate purchase orders - every feature started with a problem real businesses told us they had.

None of these were built because AI is trending. They were built because we kept hearing the same problems from our customers and knew technology could do something about them.

What this all adds up to

SMEs aren't disengaged from AI. They're not cynical. They're not waiting for someone else to go first.

They're trying to move, but they're hitting the same walls repeatedly - not enough expertise, no clear route to funding, and tools that weren't designed with their reality in mind.

Morgan put it simply in his interview: "I listen to the customer. I don't listen to the industry." For SMEs trying to figure out where to start with AI, that's probably the best advice going. Ignore the noise. Start with the problem. Find the tool that actually solves it.

This research was conducted by Enterpryze in partnership with Agile Executive. Respondents were drawn from Enterpryze customers, partners, and the wider SME community, representing functions including Leadership, Marketing, IT, Finance, Sales, Operations, and Services.