Is AI usage driving topline revenue for small and medium sized businesses or is it a panacea for our collective Silver-bullet Syndrome : Do you have “Silver-bullet Syndrome or SBS? – K. Hollingsworth Consulting, that is the belief that you can invest a little bit of time or money and get outsize results?
When Optimism Meets AI
I arrived home from the AI conference full of optimism for the future of business and informed anyone who would listen that “I” was going to build agents for myself and my clients. I even made a video about it.
Building an agent was going to be so easy, accessible, and doable. “The man” at the Microsoft conference on AI and Copilot said so.
He said that Microsoft’s vision is to make AI so accessible that every employee will be empowered to build their own agent, making work better and companies more profitable. He had slides and was brimming with confidence.
My Silver-bullet Syndrome shifted into high gear.
Fast-forward eighteen months and there are no “made by me” AI agents lurking around my computer.
Learning how to build my own agent using Copilot while navigating the world of Microsoft licensing was overwhelming at best. I did not have the time to invest in learning how to do it. I had other, more important work to do.
But honestly, I felt duped.
Not by Microsoft’s promises, but by my own willingness to believe that AI was the easy button to more revenue.
What the Data Shows on AI and SMB Adoption
I consult with small and medium-sized businesses from $2 million to $20 million in annual revenue, and I can tell you that no one is building their own agents.
It’s true that some employees are using ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, etc… to help with some elements of their job like writing proposals, doing research, or composing emails.
But for most non-enterprise businesses, there aren’t company-wide, process-driven, adoption of these tools nor do they have a person or team dedicated to documenting internal workflows and building their own agents.
The data confirms this observation.
An interesting survey from the Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS) covering September 2023 to August 2025, shows that while most small businesses with less than 250 employees are using AI automation tools for marketing activities, most do not find that AI is relevant to their core operations.[1]
A more recent study, published on May 5th, 2026 by Gartner, shows that the expansion of AI at the enterprise level did not yield the expected revenue returns, “Among organizations piloting or deploying autonomous business capabilities, approximately 80% report workforce reductions…However, those reductions do not appear to translate into return on investment (ROI).”[2] (I like to look at Enterprise trends to see what will be coming down market in the next year or so).
But does this mean you shouldn’t expect a return on your AI investment? Not necessarily. It simply means taking a measured approach and adjusting your expectations will likely produce better results for in the short and long term.
How Can AI Be Worth the Investment? Fill the Gaps
So far, there is some evidence that AI tools may lower the Cost of Customer Acquisition (CCA) when properly applied. For example, you can use it for list building and lead qualification. However, using it to replace core, person-to-person sales, marketing, and customer service functions may not yield the kind of top-line revenue leaders are looking for.
Not only that, but in the long-term replacing these people-driven revenue functions may work to harm a company’s brand equity.
Here’s an interesting insight from State of the Brand regarding the Gartner study and their own internal documentation, “Cutting people for AI is not improving financial performance. The companies doing it are performing no better than the ones that kept their teams and invested in transformation.” [3]
This doesn’t mean that as an SMB you shouldn’t look for ways in which it can fill in efficiency gaps or use it to lower your CCA.
From Fever Dream to Strategy
Now that I’m over my homemade-AI agent fever-dream, my team and I are using several AI tools to help produce high quality reports and content, conduct research, and to build in efficiencies to help improve our margins.
Our goal is to improve quality of our service offerings across all channels, not just focusing on doing more with less.
How our methodology translates into revenue is through customer retention, via higher quality outputs, which in turn creates customer referrals, and case studies for customer attraction. Currently, we’re working on using AI to do lead qualification activities to help to shorten the sales cycle for some of our clients.
We advocate for a heart and mind approach to injecting AI into your revenue generation cycle.
That is, lean back into your company’s “why” you do what you do and “who” your products and services are for. With that in mind, start to document the internal processes that are hindering you and your team from being true to those statements. In other words, find the gaps.
You can, and should, use AI to help you better implement your company’s vision and mission. Filling those gaps will help you grow your revenue.
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Let’s get together.
If you’re an owner, president, or leader of a small or midsized company and you want to identify key areas to grow and/or scale your topline revenue then let’s talk.
Email me directly at Krista@helpugrowcro.com or schedule a discovery call at https://calendly.com/helpugrowcro/30min
[2] Gartner Says Autonomous Business and AI Layoffs May Create Budget Room, but Do Not Deliver Returns
[3] 80% of Companies Cut Jobs for AI. It Didn’t Improve Their Returns. Not Even a Little.