How Many Small Businesses Use AI in Australia in 2026?

AI in Australia is common but shallow in small business. The National AI Centre found 44% of small and medium businesses were adopting AI in February 2026. That's up from 41% in the tracker's June 2025 release.

That figure comes from the centre's SME AI Pulse for December 2025 to February 2026, first published on 7 May 2026. The SME AI Pulse is a monthly government survey of at least 400 small and medium business owners. Across the whole quarter it was 43%, down slightly from 45% the quarter before. So the growth has slowed, even if the headline still sounds big.

The more useful detail sits inside the adopters. The centre says limited, one-off use is falling and broad use across the business is at a 7-month high. Firms that commit to AI tend to go deeper. The ones that only dabble tend to stall, which is the same pattern UnderCurrent Automations sees in Australian owners who ask for help.

The two numbers measure different things. The ABS asks if a business used AI at work over a full year, while the tracker asks owners to rate their own adoption.

The ABS media release, released 25 June 2026, says about 12% of all Australian businesses used AI in 2024–25. For small and micro businesses it was around 11%.

Neither number is wrong. The tracker counts an owner who "uses ChatGPT a bit", while the ABS asks a stricter question. Many owners have tried AI, and far fewer have built it into how the business runs.

Information, media and telecommunications leads AI use in Australia at 38%, according to the ABS. Professional, scientific and technical services, plus financial and insurance services, sit at 24% each.

The same data shows size matters a lot. About 35% of large businesses use AI, against 22% of medium businesses. Small and micro firms trail well behind them at around 11%. In the same ABS data, small firms that had improved a product or process were at 19%, almost five times the 4% of those that hadn't.

The National AI Centre's monthly data tells a similar story by sector. Health, education and services firms lead, with more than half using AI. Construction and agriculture are under 30%. If you run a trade business, you're in the slowest group, so there's still room to get ahead.

Trust is the biggest barrier. About 65% of small and medium businesses not using AI said they distrust its decisions or want to keep human control.

That finding is from the same National AI Centre quarterly report. The next barrier was relevance, with 54% of non-adopters saying AI isn't relevant to their business. Another 19% of all small and medium firms said they simply don't know how to use it, up 2% on the quarter before.

Those three reasons have one thing in common. Most owners have only seen AI as a chatbot that writes text. They haven't seen it read their inbox, update their job sheet or send the invoice. The centre's own report says businesses need examples that look like their own. The fix is to map AI to the jobs your team already does each week.

Writing and data analysis come first. Among small and medium businesses using or planning AI, 54% use it for content creation and the same share for data analytics.

Cyber security and threat detection come next at 48%. Agentic AI is software that takes several steps on its own to finish a job. It's still largely untapped. So is AI for supply chains or HR. The centre puts this down to low awareness and low confidence.

Safeguards are patchy too. About half of current users check AI output before it reaches a customer. Far fewer tell customers when AI is involved or give them a way to raise a concern. If that's you, business.gov.au says to make one senior person accountable for AI and write down what it can and can't be used for.

Your customers are already using AI to find businesses like yours, even if your team isn't. We track it on our own site, and the change is fast.

UnderCurrent Automations is a small Australian business too. In August 2026, visits to our own site from AI assistants went from 3 to 28 sessions in a month. Of those 28, 24 came from ChatGPT. Nobody clicked an ad. In each case, an assistant read our pages, answered someone's question and sent them to us.

That's the part the surveys don't measure. The question for an owner isn't only "do we use AI?" It's also "can AI find and explain us?" Pages that answer a question clearly get cited. Pages that bury the answer get skipped, which is why AI search works differently from classic search.

Staying at the trial stage keeps every repeat admin job manual, and those hours add up. Here's a simple example you can check against your own week.

Say you spend 5 hours a week on quotes, follow-up emails and chasing invoices.

This is an example, not a client result, so swap in your own hours and rate. If two people share that work, double it.

Now picture one of those jobs running on its own. Quote requests get logged, a draft goes out for your review, and the follow-up sends itself on day three. Owners we've worked with usually start there, with one process mapped end to end before they buy any new tool.

The government's free help sits on business.gov.au and the National AI Centre site. Both give plain guides, templates and safety rules for small firms.

These are the four free guides we tell Australian owners to read first:

• The Guidance for AI Adoption: Foundations, for firms starting out
• The free AI policy template from the National AI Centre
• The AI register template, to list every AI tool you use
• Safe Work Australia's page on AI risks at work

The wider plan is the National AI Plan, launched 2 December 2025. One of its three goals is spreading AI use across every region and industry. If you'd rather learn it in a room, AI training for small business is another way in.

Start with the one repeat job that costs you the most hours each week, not with a new tool. That's the rule we apply with every Australian owner. The tool choice is easy once the job, its steps and its hours are clear.

If you're not sure where AI fits in your business, start with the work that's costing you most. In a consult, UnderCurrent Automations maps where your current way of working costs time and money, then names the one fix to make first. Book a consult.

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