17% of small EU firms use AI vs 55% of large; lack of skills is the top barrier

01Small firms use AI at a third of the rate of large ones

No Indian agency publishes AI use by firm size; the closest official series is Eurostat’s annual survey of enterprises in the 27 EU countries, which asks the same question of firms of every size. In 2025, 20.0% of enterprises with ten or more staff used at least one AI technology, up 6.5 percentage points in a year. The gap by size is the story: 17.0% of small firms, 30.4% of medium-sized ones and 55.0% of large ones.¹

What firms use is less exotic than the 2023 list suggested. The most common technology in 2025 was text mining, used by 11.8% of enterprises, followed by generating pictures, video or sound at 9.6% and generating written or spoken language at 8.8%.¹ In practice that is a chatbot answering questions about documents, a design tool making images, and an assistant drafting emails. All three now come inside software a small business already licenses, which is the point of section 3.

02Skills, law and privacy stop more firms than usefulness

Eurostat also asks the firms that considered AI but did not adopt it why. The answer is not that AI is useless to them. Lack of relevant expertise was cited by 70.9%, unclear legal consequences by 52.5%, and data-protection and privacy worries by 48.8%. Only 20.7% said the technology was not useful to their business, the least common reason on the list.¹

Read the top three together and they describe one problem. A small firm does not know what an AI tool will do with its customer data, whether that is lawful, or who internally could check. A list of seven tools answered none of those questions. The fix is cheaper than a new subscription: one named person who owns AI use, a one-page rule on what data may be pasted into which tool, and a preference for the assistant whose data terms the business has already accepted for email and documents.

The evidence against this reading deserves a line. These are firms that considered AI and stopped, so they are the curious minority; the larger group that never considered it may simply see no use. And the survey asks whether a firm uses AI, not whether it saves money. We found no official count of the savings the 2023 post promised, and we would distrust any vendor survey that claims one for small firms in general.

03An AI seat costs ₹0 to ₹2,099 a month in India

The original promised savings without a price. Here are the prices. Google stopped selling Gemini as an add-on in January 2025 and folded it into its Business and Enterprise plans, raising the base price instead.² In India, Business Starter is ₹270 a user a month and Business Standard ₹1,080, both with Gemini included and tax extra.³ Microsoft sells Microsoft 365 Copilot Business as an add-on on top of a Microsoft 365 plan, listed at ₹1,745 a user a month on annual commitment, with GST extra.⁴ When OpenAI began testing rupee pricing in August 2025, its Team plan, the tier it now sells as Business, was reported at ₹2,099 a seat a month.⁵

The comparison is not like for like, and that is the decision. A firm already on Workspace has paid for its first AI seat and should use it for a quarter before buying another. A firm on Microsoft 365 is choosing whether drafting in Word and summarising Teams calls is worth ₹1,745 a head; for most it is worth it for a few roles, not for everyone. ChatGPT Business suits a team that wants the strongest general assistant regardless of suite, and it is the one where data terms need reading most carefully, because it sits outside the contract that already governs the firm’s email.