TL;DR

Novuna Business Finance polled 1,000 UK small business owners and found 31% already using AI, 7% considering it, 27% with no plans to use it and 21% who do not regard it as relevant to their business. That leaves nearly half the sample effectively outside the technology, for reasons that are more considered than a simple awareness gap.

Where the divide runs

Adoption clusters geographically. London leads at 41%, followed by the West Midlands at 38% and the North West at 36%. In the other nine regions, the combined share saying they have no plans or see no relevance exceeds the share already using it. The East Midlands sits at 22% adoption with 37% ruling it out; the North East reports 27% adoption against 39% ruling it out.

By sector the spread is wider still. IT and telecoms runs at 65% and media and marketing at 55%, against agriculture at 10%, real estate at 17% and construction at 18%. Agriculture is the outlier at both ends: 46% have no plans and 38% consider it irrelevant.

The reason given is not cost

Among non-users, 59% pointed to businesses built on close personal relationships — a view strongest across the northern regions and the East Midlands, where between 68% and 76% gave that answer. Concerns about the energy and natural resources AI consumes were raised by 22%, legal worries over sensitive data collection by another 22%, and unease about demographic bias by 20%.

Novuna’s head of insight, Jo Morris, noted a correlation that needs reading carefully: 59% of firms growing significantly this quarter use AI, against 23% of those contracting. Which way the causation runs is not established. She also flagged that nearly three in ten owners simply did not know what AI might do for them.

Looking forward

The context is a difficult quarter. Only 24% of small firms now forecast growth for July to September, the lowest share the survey has recorded, and it drops to 15% in construction and 21% in both retail and hospitality. Among users, the benefits cited are modest and operational: back-office efficiency (16%), digital marketing (15%), market research and product development (14%).

With a new AI Taskforce charged with accelerating adoption and driving growth, the gap between policy ambition and this data is the thing to watch. Most UK businesses are not the ones signing large AI contracts, and roughly one in five has concluded the technology has nothing to offer them at all.