Research
We track how AI actually reaches business
Not the hype cycle — the adoption data, the field reports, and the frontier research on how small businesses and whole industries are really putting AI to work. This is where we collect what we're learning, and where our next deep-dives begin.
Research · 01
Small Business & AI
How the smallest teams are actually adopting AI — what they automate first, where it pays off, and how the old size-versus-capability equation is being rewritten. We track the adoption data and pressure-test it against what we see on the ground with the businesses we work with.
The Great Equalizer: Why AI Doesn't Just Help Small Businesses Compete — It Renders the Old Game Obsolete
Small businesses now hold a weapon that Fortune 500 companies spent decades and billions building: operational intelligence at scale. The window to wield it is closing. This is the strategic playbook for leaders who refuse to be left behind.
Main Street Got It First
AI workflow automation for small businesses arrived before the enterprise figured out what to do with it. The implications run deeper than payroll.
Six Hires, Not Sixty
The conventional playbook for building an internal AI team gets priced against Mark Zuckerberg's billion-dollar offer letters. Here is what a small, durable AI capability actually looks like in mid-2026.
What the Box Can't Hold
Anthropic shipped a small-business automation box in May. The fifteen workflows inside are the median of what every small business does. The part that made yours uncopyable is the part the box can't hold.
AI Automation: Where to Start in Your Organization
A practical framework for identifying and prioritizing AI automation opportunities.
Read What The Model Wrote
AI strategy for non-technical founders is no longer about which builder to pick. It is about whether you can read what the generator shipped before a stranger does.
Empowering Small Business: 58% of small businesses now use generative AI
The Chamber's fourth annual survey of 3,870 small businesses: generative-AI use jumped to 58%, up from 40% a year earlier, with a majority of businesses in all 50 states now embracing it.
Half of small business workers use AI — most to boost productivity, not automate jobs
Roughly half of workers at small businesses already use AI on the job — overwhelmingly to enhance their own output rather than to eliminate roles. A useful counter to the headcount-panic narrative.
Anthropic Economic Index: uneven enterprise AI adoption
Real usage data, not survey claims: 77% of business API use is full-task automation (vs ~50% for consumers), and US firm adoption more than doubled to ~9.7% in under two years.
Research · 02
Industry Trends
Where AI adoption is really going across the market and inside specific sectors — from enterprise pilots that stall before production to the verticals (healthcare, legal, financial services) where AI is moving into live workflows. We read the frontier research so our clients don't have to.
Seven Percent Were Ready
Cloudera and Harvard Business Review found only 7 percent of enterprises call their data fully ready for AI. MIT NANDA found 95 percent of pilots fail. Data readiness for AI adoption is the gap, and most boards are still buying the wrong half of the problem.
Production Was the Trial
Sinch's May 2026 report shows 74% of enterprises have pulled back live AI customer agents after going to production, and the generative AI business use cases that survive month four look nothing like the ones in the vendor deck.
No Line Item For Agents
Gartner expects 40 percent of agentic AI projects to be canceled by 2027. They aren't dying from bad models. They're dying because no CFO can book them. Measuring ROI on AI initiatives starts with fixing the ledger, not softening the metric.
When the Lab Moves In
OpenAI and Anthropic just turned themselves into consultancies in the same week. The buyer who treats this as a procurement event will lose the decade.
The Friction Tax: Why Every Dollar You Don't Invest in AI Automation Is a Dollar Paid to Your Own Obsolescence
ROI on AI automation isn't a spreadsheet exercise — it's a survival calculus. The enterprises that fail to rewire their operational nervous systems won't just fall behind. They'll become structurally incapable of competing.
Agents Need Org Charts
Most enterprise AI agent deployments fail at the management layer, not the model layer. The org chart is the bottleneck, and 74 percent of enterprises just learned why.
AI Papers Weekly: Trust, Cost, and Compliance in Enterprise AI
This week, we explore how enterprises can deploy trustworthy, cost-effective, and legally compliant AI. We cover real-time hallucination prevention in high-stakes environments, early-abort mechanisms to slash compute costs, and new methods for erasing copyrighted data from generative models.
AI Papers Weekly: Building Trustworthy Enterprise AI
Discover how the latest AI research tackles enterprise risks. We explore auditable compliance engines, why LLMs struggle with spreadsheets, and a breakthrough in teaching AI to recognize its own knowledge limits. Tune in to learn how to deploy AI safely and reliably.
AI Papers Weekly: The Agentic AI Reckoning
Three new papers converge on a single message for executives: agentic AI is compressing the attack lifecycle, breaking classical identity models, and quietly eroding the integrity of the answers it gives. Defense, governance, and epistemic discipline now belong on the same agenda.
The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation
88% of organizations now use AI in at least one function — but only about a third have scaled it, and just ~6% are capturing material EBIT impact. The gap is an operating-model problem, not a technology one.
Gartner predicts over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by 2027
Escalating costs, unclear business value, and inadequate risk controls will sink a large share of today's agent projects — most of which are hype-driven experiments, not scoped deployments.
How AI is used in FDA-authorized medical devices: a taxonomy across 1,016 authorizations
A peer-reviewed look at the healthcare vertical: how AI actually shows up across more than a thousand FDA-cleared medical devices — heavy in imaging and documentation, still thin in core diagnosis.
Generative AI adoption nearly doubles as professional services reach a crossroads
The legal and professional-services vertical: active generative-AI use jumped from 14% to 26% year-over-year, with 45% of law firms planning to make it central — while governance lags behind.
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