ExKey flags 3 barriers to SME AI adoption

The article opens with a familiar complaint: smaller companies want to use generative AI but do not know which business process to start with, and they lack the people to push adoption forward. ExKey's contribution is to sort those complaints into three distinct problems, separating the question of what to AI-ify from the question of who will do it and whether it sticks after the tools arrive.

That sorting matters because the 2026 White Paper on Small and Medium Enterprises, cited in the article, shows the two biggest reasons companies cite for not using AI even after investing in labor-saving measures: 63.4% say they cannot picture the tasks to which AI would apply, and 40.0% say they lack people to promote its use. In other words, the gap is not only access to tools; it is the judgment about what to change and the staffing to carry that change through.

The stakes, based on the body's framing, hinge on whether smaller firms can move past simply preparing an AI-capable environment. Tasks like inquiry handling, minutes-taking, and routine accounting, general affairs, and HR work are named as candidates, but the article also notes that for some operations the cost and operational burden may outweigh the benefit. For managers without a dedicated AI team, the practical test is likely to be whether they can pick a starting process and assign an owner for deployment and daily use, rather than expecting the tools themselves to change how work is done.