The small business margin gap and why AI pilots stay stuck at 70%
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Plus: Introducing the aibl AI Enablement Directory for UK Partners
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From the aibl team
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Every mid-market firm we work with has been through a painful CRM migration. Steering meetings, arguments about what stays and what goes, months of training. AI adoption is the same kind of project, but most organisations aren’t treating it as one.
Aaron Asadi‘s father ran a small business and could fix anything. But he couldn’t afford an accountant or a marketer, and the business didn’t survive. Aaron now runs Enterprise Nation, which has 150,000 small business members. That’s how he sees the AI opportunity: these tools could have filled the gaps his dad couldn’t afford to hire for.
79% of his members are using AI in some form. But when he digs into what that means, 80% are essentially running the business as they always have, with a chatbot on top. Nobody audited the systems they already had. The tools got marketed as magic wands and owners took that at face value.
We see the same thing at mid-market scale. The tools exist to fill those gaps now, but nobody’s treating the shift seriously enough to make them work. Aaron walks through what that looks like in practice in the interview below.
It’s also why we’re building the AI Enablement Directory: a human-reviewed, independently verified resource for UK mid-market firms looking for AI partners. When leaders do treat this as a real project, the next question is who can help. The market makes that surprisingly hard to answer. More on the directory and how to register as a partner further down.
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Why most small businesses aren’t getting past the basics with AI
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Aaron Asadi is CEO of Enterprise Nation. His father ran a small business in the 90s. Could fix anything. “He’s like BA Baracas from the A-Team – give him a box of matchsticks, he’d turn it into a washing machine.” But running a business takes more than being good at the work. He wasn’t an accountant, English wasn’t his first language, and he had no marketing experience. The business didn’t survive.
It’s a common story. Enterprise Nation has 150,000 members, mostly businesses with ten or fewer employees. The pattern repeats across them. Someone brilliant at one thing, exposed everywhere else, unable to hire the team to cover the rest.
AI could fill those gaps. Not perfectly. As Aaron puts it: “Maybe it’s 70% the best copywriter you’ve ever seen, but 70% is infinitely more than 0%.” It handles the work they never got into business to do. “You want artists to be artists. You want mechanics to be mechanics. You don’t want them doing stuff they didn’t get in business to do.”
There are 5.7 million small businesses in the UK, driving 52% of business turnover. Aaron does the maths: “If we can just affect every small business in terms of margin or profitability by 10%, you’ve grown the business turnover of this country by 5%.”
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Watch the full video interview:
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Something we’ve been building, and why
I’ve spent the last six months talking to mid-market leaders about AI adoption. They know they need to move, and they need a partner who can help them actually get somewhere with it.
There are hundreds of AI consultancies, training businesses and implementation specialists out there, from one-person bands to large firms. Most look identical online, and there’s no independent way to compare them.
The AI Enablement Directory, powered by aibl, is a human-reviewed listing of UK AI partners covering adoption, implementation and training. Every listed business has been verified by the aibl team: mid-market delivery experience, live production work, sector relevance and UK delivery capability.
It’s free for operators. We don’t take commission or referral fees. The aibl Verified mark means we’ve looked at them and they passed.
If you’re an AI enablement business, registration is open now for a planned launch in the Spring. Please also pass on the link if you work with an AI consultancy, training provider or implementation specialist you’d recommend.
For anyone weighing up their options, I’ve published a practical guide. It covers the questions to ask, the red flags to watch for and why most evaluation frameworks focus on the wrong things: How to choose an AI implementation partner.
More on the directory in the coming weeks.
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Product spotlight of the week
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This week we’ve been looking at Wispr Flow, a voice dictation tool that works across apps like Slack, Salesforce, email and IDEs. You speak naturally and the AI cleans it up, stripping filler words, adjusting tone per app and learning your team’s jargon over time. The jargon piece is what makes it interesting for mid-market teams. Everyone has internal shorthand that generic transcription tools mangle.
The best example we’ve found is Clay, who piloted Flow across their revenue ops team. Within a month, half the team had adopted it. Response times dropped 52%, and reps were making 20% more calls per day. For sales and support teams where typing is the bottleneck (and it often is), those are real numbers. There’s a free tier to test with, Pro plans start around $12-15 per user per month, and every teammate gets a 14-day trial.
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