Unlocking Value from AI: How Growth Businesses Are Moving from Experimentation to Impact (BGF Ventures)

Summary

• 71% of UK and Irish SME leaders say AI is important to their business today, and 75% say it is important to their long-term growth.p.4
• 84% of leaders have grown more optimistic or trusting of AI in the past 12 months.p.4
• 41% see AI primarily as a growth driver, 34% as a cost saver and 25% as both, a share that rises to 82% among BGF portfolio companies.p.5
• Cybersecurity and fraud detection is the most common area of AI deployment at 36%, followed by customer support at 34%.p.12
• Skills or capability gaps are the most cited barrier at 40%, and 74% of CPOs cite them compared with 35% of CEOs and MDs.p.17
• 34% of leaders say uncertainty about ROI is holding back AI adoption, while only 6% say they can measure AI ROI with confidence.p.18
• 83% of SME leaders believe an external AI advisor would be beneficial, yet fewer than 1% have one.p.29

Key insights

1. Portfolio companies are more likely than non-portfolio companies to see AI as an advantage through operational efficiency and cost savings (93% vs 54%) and through accelerating innovation (82% vs 52%).p.7
2. Portfolio companies are nearly four times more likely to view AI as an opportunity than the broader sample (70% vs 19%).p.25
3. Bootstrapped businesses (46%) are far more likely to have at least one AI use case in production than the cross-stage average (21%).p.12
4. 30% of Series C+ businesses are still at the exploration stage, while 26% of seed stage businesses have embedded AI across the organisation.p.10
5. Conviction on AI is strongest among product and technology leaders: 89% of Chief Product Officers and 81% of Chief Technology Officers see it as important to future growth, compared with 68% of CEOs and MDs.p.5
6. Change management and employee adoption are cited by 37% of leaders as a significant barrier, and 65% in manufacturing and utilities name security constraints as a top blocker.p.17
7. Poor decision quality is the most cited long-term AI risk at 40%, followed by regulatory exposure at 39% and vendor over-reliance at 36%.p.23
8. Almost every business leader surveyed (95%) believes investors should play a role in driving AI adoption.p.29