Two Years from Now, You Will Wish You Had Started Today
Competitive advantages that compound are the most durable kind. A business that starts integrating AI into its workflows this quarter does not just get 6 months of productivity gains. It gets 6 months of learning – understanding which processes AI handles well, where it needs human oversight, how to structure the workflow, and how to train the team. That organisational knowledge cannot be purchased later. It has to be built.
The data is starting to show this effect clearly.
What the Research Says About the Gap
McKinsey’s November 2025 State of AI survey – which gathered responses from 1,993 participants across 105 countries between June and July 2025 – found that while 88% of organisations report regularly using AI in at least one business function, the depth of that use varies enormously by company size.
For companies with revenues under $100 million, only 29% have reached the scaling phase – meaning they are actively expanding AI deployment across their organisation. For companies with over $5 billion in revenue, the figure is nearly half. The gap is not primarily about access to AI tools. It is about who has moved from experimenting to embedding.
What High Performers Are Doing Differently
The same McKinsey research identified a group it calls AI high performers: companies that attribute 5% or more of their EBIT to AI use and report seeing significant value. This group represents about 6% of respondents – but their behaviours are instructive for any business trying to close the gap.
High performers are more than three times as likely as others to have fundamentally redesigned their workflows around AI: 55% of high performers have done so, compared with 20% of all other respondents. They are not using AI to make the existing process slightly faster. They are rebuilding the process around what AI can now do.
High performers also set different objectives. While 80% of all organisations say efficiency is an objective of their AI efforts, high performers are significantly more likely to also set growth and innovation as objectives – using AI not just to cut costs but to do things they could not do before.
What This Means for a Small Business
None of this requires an enterprise technology budget. It requires clarity on which process is worth redesigning first, the right implementation partner, and the organisational commitment to follow through past the pilot phase.
The businesses winning with AI right now are not the ones with the most sophisticated systems. They are the ones that picked one high-value use case, built it properly, measured the results, and moved to the next. That compounding effect – more time, better data, deeper organisational capability – is what creates the gap that late movers will struggle to close.
The US Chamber of Commerce’s 2025 Empowering Small Business report found that 77% of small businesses using AI say that limits on the technology would negatively impact their growth, operations, and bottom line. That is a telling signal: businesses that have started do not want to stop. The question is whether your business will be among them a year from now.
DoSystems has helped more than 120 businesses across healthcare, legal, real estate, insurance, and transportation start – and scale – their AI programs. Book a free strategy call at DoSystemsInc.com.
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