What Is the Biggest Barrier to AI Adoption for SMEs?

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.

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.

Why Most SMEs Are Stuck on AI And It Has Nothing to Do with Budget?

A third of respondents (33.3%) identified lack of expertise as their biggest barrier to AI adoption. Not cost. Not unclear ROI. Not time. Knowledge. For context, only 14.8% cited cost or unclear return as their main blocker less than half the number pointing to skills.

That gap matters more than it might seem. If the problem is money, you throw money at it. But expertise doesn't work that way. Throwing budget at a knowledge problem doesn't solve it you need better solutions, clearer guidance, and technology that 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 sitting down with Ronan Leonard to discuss his background, the story behind Enterpryze, and what AI really 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 looking at where AI could deliver some real value." That's the trap. Businesses hear the buzz, feel the pressure, and reach for tools before they've identified the problem they're trying to fix.

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

The Honest Truth: Most SMEs Are Still Figuring Out AI?

Only 18.5% of respondents said AI is already core to how they work. The other 74% are still exploring, still testing, or haven't started yet.

That's not a failure it’s honesty. SMEs don't have the luxury of failed experiments. There's no large IT department to absorb the cost when something doesn't land. No innovation budget to write off. So, businesses move carefully, and that makes complete sense.

But careful has a time limit.

The next 12 to 24 months will separate the businesses that got ahead from the ones that fell behind. The window isn't closing it’s already closing. And the SMEs still waiting for AI to feel "ready" may find that by the time it does, the advantage has already shifted to someone else.

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 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. It's also exactly what Morgan Browne explored in his interview on the Irish Tech News Podcast where he makes the case that AI is the fourth interface for how businesses will interact with their systems. Not a trend. Not a feature. A fundamental shift in how work gets done.

Skills Gap Is Only Half the Story

Here's what 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? Most AI tools on the market were never built for SMEs in the first place. They were built to showcase what the technology can do not to solve the specific, unglamorous problems a growing business deals with every single day. The gap isn't just skills. It's fit.

There's also something that rarely makes it into the vendor brochure: data quality.

Morgan flagged this directly in his podcast interview. "If your data isn't good, then your AI isn't going to work. If you're not tracking your landed costs against 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 it's one that gets glossed over in almost every AI conversation. Businesses invest in the tool before they've fixed the foundation. The result isn't smarter decisions. It's faster bad ones.

It's why Enterpryze builds AI around clean, connected data so that when the technology makes a recommendation, it's working from a single source of truth across inventory, finance, and operations, not a patchwork of disconnected systems.

The question that should drive every AI product decision is simple: what problem does this business 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.

So, What Does This All Mean for Your Business?

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 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.

Ready to see what AI-powered ERP looks like in practice? Book a demo with Enterpryze and we'll show you exactly how it works for your business.