The case for AI in business

We won't tell you AI matters.
Here's who already has.

Five clippings, five different sources — an economist, a chancellor, a former chancellor, a national statistics office, and the world's largest business adviser. None of them work for us.

Instead of asking you to take our word for the wider picture, here is theirs.

George Osborne — managing director and head of OpenAI for Countries

"AI is not something businesses can come back to later. It is quickly becoming the baseline for how work gets done."

One in three of Britain's smallest firms aren't using AI at all.

Mohamed Kande — Global Chairman, PwC, on the survey of 4,454 CEOs across 95 countries

56% of CEOs report neither increased revenue nor lower costs from AI over the past twelve months.

Only 12% saw both — PwC calls them the "vanguard": the ones with a defined roadmap before they started.

Artificial intelligence in UK businesses, 2023 to 2026

UK business AI adoption has nearly tripled since 2023 — but the ONS's own finding is that it is "widening, not deepening."

More businesses trying something. Not more businesses actually changing how they work.

Rachel Reeves — Chancellor of the Exchequer, Mais Lecture

AI is "the defining technology of our era."

"The AI productivity dividend is how small, medium and large businesses will grow" — and Britain now aims for the fastest adoption of any G7 nation.

Erik Brynjolfsson — director, on US productivity data through 2025

"We are now transitioning out of this investment phase into a harvest phase where those earlier efforts begin to manifest as measurable output."

US productivity rose roughly 2.7% in 2025 — nearly double the decade average.

Why this page exists

Every one of our own pages makes a narrow, checkable claim about one thing: your line, answered. We don't want to widen that into an argument about AI in general — that's not our job, and it isn't what we're selling.

But if you want the bigger picture before you decide anything, it's a fair question, and it deserves a real answer — not ours. So here it is, in the words of the people whose job it actually is to study this.

The gap isn't between businesses that believe in AI and businesses that don't. It's between businesses that changed how they work, and businesses that didn't.

Any question, or if you'd like the source for any of the above in full: robert@merchantsvirtual.org — the reply comes from me, same working day.

See what we've built from this

We won't tell you AI matters.Here's who already has.

Why this page exists

We won't tell you AI matters.
Here's who already has.