AI for Small Business: Why 46% Would Skip Hiring

The short version: a new 2026 survey on AI for small business found that 46% of owners would now choose an AI tool over hiring a new employee for equal capability, up from 38% a year ago. That sounds like a story about jobs disappearing. It is not. The more useful number in the same survey is 70%: the share of owners who admit they still need more training to use AI effectively, most of them learning by watching YouTube videos rather than following any structured plan. The hiring question gets the headline. The training gap is what actually decides who sees a return.

What Did the 2026 Survey on AI for Small Business Actually Find?

Thryv surveyed 561 U.S. small and midsize business decision-makers in April 2026, all running companies with roughly $1 to $1.9 million in annual revenue, none of them Thryv customers, recruited through an independent research panel spanning construction, professional services, retail, restaurants, and personal services. The full results, published this week, show adoption climbing to 66%, up from 55% a year earlier. Among the businesses already using AI, 92% say it saves them time, and 79% expect to recover somewhere between 11 and 60 hours a month. Seventy percent said AI contributed to revenue growth over the past year, and 55% said it helped cut costs.

Those are strong numbers, and they track with what other 2026 research on small business AI confidence has already shown: adoption is no longer the interesting variable. Nearly every owner has tried AI by now. What separates outcomes is what they do with it after the first prompt.

Would You Really Skip Your Next Hire for AI?

The number drawing attention is the 46% of owners who said that, given a choice between hiring a new employee and adopting an AI tool that could handle equivalent work, they would pick the AI. That is up eight points from 38% last year, and it is easy to read as small business quietly automating people out of the picture.

The rest of the survey argues against that reading. Only 13% of respondents said they had actually hired fewer people over the past 12 months because of AI. Fifty-five percent hired exactly as many people as they had planned, and 45% expect no hiring impact at all in the next year. The “would choose AI” question is hypothetical and framed around equal capability, a scenario that rarely exists cleanly in a five-person shop. In practice, most owners are not choosing between a person and a chatbot. They are deciding whether the next hire needs to spend their first three months on repetitive intake, scheduling, and paperwork, or whether AI can absorb that layer so a new hire starts on higher-value work sooner, and so the owner can wait a quarter longer before hiring at all.

That is the empowerment case in practice: the point of AI here is not fewer people, it is more capacity from the people already on payroll, including the owner. Our guide to what small businesses should automate first walks through exactly this distinction: automating the missed call, the invoice reminder, or the receipt pile does not replace the person who used to chase those tasks down. It gives that person, or the owner, room to do something a machine still cannot.

Why Are So Many Owners Stuck Saying They Need More Training?

Here is the finding that should carry more weight than the hiring number. Despite 66% adoption and 86% of owners saying they feel somewhere between somewhat and extremely comfortable with AI, 70% still say they need more training to use it effectively. Comfort and competence are not the same thing, and the survey’s breakdown of where owners actually learn AI explains the gap: 57% rely primarily on YouTube and social media, 49% use general online resources and webinars, and 33% simply ask an AI tool like ChatGPT to teach them, with no structured curriculum behind any of it.

None of those sources are bad starting points. But watching a video and building a repeatable workflow are different skills, and a third of owners asking the AI to explain itself, with no way to check whether the explanation is even accurate, is a quiet risk hiding inside a comfort number that looks reassuring on the surface. As Ken Cook of The Prepared Group put it in the survey’s release, “the biggest mistake small businesses can make is blindly trusting AI. Use it only for tasks you understand.” That is a useful filter no matter where your training comes from: if you cannot explain what the tool is actually doing with your data or your customer’s information, you are not ready to hand it the task yet, regardless of how comfortable you feel pressing the button.

What Should You Actually Do With This Data?

Two moves come out of this survey more clearly than any headline number. First, before your next hiring decision, separate the parts of the job that are genuinely repetitive and rules-based from the parts that require judgment, relationships, or accountability. Automate or delegate to AI only the first category, the same triage covered in our roundup of AI tools by the job you actually need done, and let the freed-up hours go toward growth work rather than simply avoiding a hire you would otherwise have made.

Second, treat the 70% training gap as the actual project, not a footnote. Thirty minutes a week spent testing one workflow end to end, checking the output against something you already know the right answer to, will do more for your revenue than switching to whichever model launched this month. The businesses in this survey and others seeing real financial upside are not the ones with the fanciest tool. They are the ones who stopped treating AI as a search bar and started treating it as a process they own and can explain.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is AI actually replacing small business hiring in 2026?

Not broadly, based on this data. While 46% of owners say they would choose AI over an equal-capability new hire in a hypothetical comparison, only 13% report actually hiring fewer people because of AI, and 55% hired exactly as planned. The more consistent pattern is AI absorbing repetitive tasks so existing staff and owners can take on higher-value work, not headcount shrinking outright.

What is the biggest AI training gap for small business owners right now?

Structure, not access. Most owners already have comfort with AI tools (86% report some level of comfort) and access to them, but 70% say they need more training. The majority learn informally through YouTube, social media, and general webinars rather than any structured program, which limits how far casual use translates into measurable revenue or time savings.

How much time do small businesses actually save using AI?

Among current AI users in the 2026 Thryv survey, 92% say it saves them time, and 79% expect to recover between 11 and 60 hours per month. The businesses that convert those hours into revenue are generally the ones directing the saved time toward sales, client work, or growth activity rather than just working fewer hours on the same tasks.

Should a small business trust AI with tasks it does not fully understand?

No. As Ken Cook of The Prepared Group noted in the survey release, the biggest mistake is blindly trusting AI, and the safer approach is limiting it to tasks you could still do yourself and check. This matters most for anything touching customer data, pricing, contracts, or compliance, where an unverified AI output can cost more than the time it saved.

If you run a small business, here is the honest question worth sitting with: when you picture your next hire, is the job you are imagining already half automatable, and if so, what would that person actually spend their first three months doing instead? Tell us what you are weighing in the comments.