Intuit's 2026 AI Impact Report, built from survey responses from more than 34,000 small and midsize business owners plus anonymized data from 5.3 million QuickBooks businesses across the US, Canada, UK, and Australia — developed with economists at the University of Chicago — puts a hard number on something most small business owners already sense: AI tools stopped being optional sometime in the last two years. 77% of U.S. small and midsize businesses now use AI regularly, up from 48% in July 2024. The full report and Intuit's summary are both public.
A separately conducted study backs up the trend line. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's 2025 "Empowering Small Business" report, which surveyed 3,870 U.S. small businesses with fewer than 250 employees, found the share of small businesses using generative AI tools rose from 23% in 2023 to 40% in 2024 and 58% in 2025, and generative AI is now the second most-used technology category (44%), just behind search engines (46%) and ahead of social media (42%). Two different survey methodologies, two different years of data, the same direction: adoption roughly doubled in about 18 months.
Where the AI Hours Are Actually Going
The QuickBooks data breaks down what small businesses are doing with that AI time, and the answer matters for anyone running a bilingual or local business in New York City: marketing is the single largest use case, ahead of customer service and bookkeeping, according to published summaries of the report. That's not AI quietly automating back-office paperwork — it's AI actively shaping what customers see first: social captions, ad copy, email campaigns, website text.
The business-impact numbers explain why owners keep reaching for it: 78% say AI improved their productivity, 43% report it contributed to revenue growth, and roughly 1 in 4 say it measurably shortened their workday. The top barriers holding back the remaining businesses are consistent across both reports — data privacy concerns, fear of factual errors, and simply not knowing what the tools can reliably do.
The Gap Between "Using AI for Marketing" and "Being Visible in AI Search"
Here's the part neither report measures, and the part that matters most for Apexzone7's clients: using AI to produce marketing content is not the same skill as being cited by AI when a customer asks ChatGPT, Perplexity, or Google's AI Overviews for a recommendation. We've covered this gap repeatedly — 88–91% of businesses are effectively invisible to AI search regardless of how much marketing content they produce, because visibility depends on consistent entity data, third-party citations, and genuinely answer-shaped content, not content volume.
If marketing is where most small businesses now point generic AI tools, the practical risk is a flood of more content that looks the same to an AI engine as everyone else's — generic, unverifiable, and not tied to a consistent business identity. More AI-drafted copy without the underlying citation work (reviews, directory listings, a correctly structured service page) doesn't move the needle on AI search visibility; it just produces more content.
What This Actually Means for NYC's Bilingual Businesses
- Don't let AI do your Chinese-language marketing by direct translation. As we found researching Nielsen's bilingual ad data, culturally resonant messaging outperforms literal translation for Chinese-American audiences. A generic AI tool asked to "translate this into Chinese" produces exactly the literal-translation problem that underperforms — have a bilingual human review anything customer-facing before it ships.
- Redirect some of that marketing-AI time toward answer-readiness, not just content volume: a clearly structured FAQ section, a consistent business name/address/phone across your website and directory listings, and service pages that state plainly what you do and who you serve.
- Treat the "fear of errors" barrier as a feature, not a blocker. The businesses getting cited by AI search engines are the ones with verifiably accurate, consistent information — the same caution that's slowing some owners down is exactly the discipline that AI visibility rewards.
- This is a window, not a permanent gap. Adoption data shows most small businesses are still in the "use AI to write faster" phase rather than the "optimize for AI citation" phase. Bilingual NYC businesses that move on both at once have a real first-mover advantage before competitors catch up.