Almost everyone’s still figuring it out.
You picked a new tool because everyone was talking about it. It never quite fit into how you work. You’re still using ChatGPT like a fancy search engine, and the buzz has already moved on to the next shiny thing.
That’s not you falling behind. We went through Stanford’s AI Index 2026 report, and the numbers back that up, at every size of company.
Most businesses have barely gotten past square one. 88% of companies now use AI somewhere, up from 78% last year. That sounds like everyone’s ahead of you. But look at how deep it actually goes: in the lowest revenue range the report breaks out, 39% are still just experimenting, another 22% are piloting, and only 5% have it fully working end to end. Most of the rest of the businesses out there are in exactly the spot you might be in, working to make it stick. And that’s still counting companies bigger than most of ours.
Even when a company gets AI working, the results are a coin flip. Across all the companies that use it regularly, only 36% saw it actually improve profitability, and the exact same share, 36%, saw no effect on profitability at all. For revenue growth it’s worse: more companies (39%) saw no effect than saw revenue actually grow (33%). Having the tool running doesn’t mean it’s doing anything for you. That gap, between using a tool and it actually paying off, is the whole reason a lot of businesses feel like they tried AI and it “didn’t work.”
Even people inside AI-using companies aren’t sold on it. In the US and most of Europe, only about half of employees use AI regularly at work, and trust runs lower still, somewhere between 40% and 48%. So even at companies further along than most, plenty of individual people using it day to day still don’t fully trust it.
The speed is real, the depth isn’t. Generative AI spread faster than the personal computer or the internet did, over half of people tried it within three years of ChatGPT’s release. That’s why it feels inescapable. But trying something fast and actually running your business on it are two very different numbers. The first one is high almost everywhere. Based on everything above, the second one still isn’t.
The tool was never the hard part, fit is. That’s the whole reason we started Sanna Studio: we build around how your business already runs, and we stay until it’s not just running, but actually paying off. We don’t hand you a tool and walk away.
If any of this sounds familiar, we’re happy to talk it through, no pitch attached.
Credit: Stanford HAI, “The AI Index 2026 Annual Report,” AI Index Steering Committee, Institute for Human-Centered AI, Stanford University, April 2026. Figures 4.3.1, 4.3.5, 4.3.6, 4.3.9, and 9.1.10.
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