74% of AI's upside is going to 20% of businesses. Here's what they do differently.
Two studies dropped this month that explain exactly why most AI investments are falling flat.
The AI Briefing: Why Most AI Investments Are Stalling (and How to Fix Yours)
Two studies landed this month that I think every business owner needs to see. Back to back.
The first came from PwC on April 13. Their 2026 AI Performance Study surveyed 1,200 senior executives across 25 industries and found that 74% of all the economic value being created by AI right now is going to just 20% of businesses.
The second came from OpenAI’s State of Enterprise AI report. Surveying 9,000 workers across nearly 100 companies, they found a 6x productivity gap between AI power users and the average employee using the same tools.
Read those together, and a clear picture forms.
This isn’t about who has AI tools. Ninety-one percent of businesses are already using AI in some capacity. The gap isn’t access. The gap is depth.
What “depth” actually means
Here’s the finding from the OpenAI report that stopped me cold. Workers who apply AI across seven different task types save 5x more time than workers who use it across only four. Same tools. Completely different results.
Most people land on one or two things they like using AI for (drafting emails, maybe some research) and they stick there. The people pulling ahead are applying it across their entire workflow: writing, analysis, planning, technical tasks, brainstorming, customer communication, and internal operations.
It is not about doing one thing well. It is about using the tool the way it was actually designed to be used.
What the PwC data adds
PwC dug into what separates the top 20% from everyone else, and the answer wasn’t the tools they chose. It was the ambition of what they used them for.
The leading companies were 2.6x more likely than their peers to say AI is helping them reinvent how their business works, not just trim a few hours off existing tasks. They were using AI to find new revenue opportunities and pursue growth, not just to get today’s work done a little faster.
The result: companies leading on AI are generating 7.2x more value than the average competitor. Not because they have better tools. Because they went deeper.
What this means for you as an SMB owner
Here is the honest version of where I see most business owners right now: they signed up for ChatGPT or Claude, used it for a few things, decided it was pretty good, and went back to running their business mostly the same way.
That’s not a criticism. It’s the default. The tool is passive. It doesn’t nudge you toward everything it can do for you.
I’ve used AI every single day since February 2023. And I’ll tell you, the biggest jumps in what I get out of it have never come from switching platforms. They’ve come from going wider inside the tools I already use.
Three moves that tend to shift results fast:
Map your week, then test AI on the hard parts. Don’t start with 15-minute tasks. Start with your two-hour tasks, the ones that require real thinking. That’s where the time savings actually compound.
Show it your real work. Don’t ask AI what it can do in the abstract. Give it an actual email you wrote, an actual proposal you created, an actual process you run. Once it sees what your work really looks like, it can improve it in ways that matter.
Push into three new task types this week. If you’re only using AI for writing, try it on analysis, planning, or operations. You don’t need to master all seven categories overnight. Adding even two or three new applications moves you up the curve fast.
The opportunity is wider open than you might think
PwC’s numbers are striking, but I want you to read them as motivation, not as a verdict. If 74% of the value is going to 20% of businesses, that means the other 80% haven’t been locked out. The window is still open.
You don’t need to rebuild your operations this week. You need to go one level deeper on what you’re already doing. That’s exactly where the advantage is being built right now, by regular business owners who decided to stop skimming the surface.
If you want to think through where you could be getting more from your current AI setup, book a clarity call with me here: muddventures.com/book — that’s exactly the kind of conversation I have with clients every week.
Until next week,
Andrew
P.S. If this was useful, forward it to one business owner who’s curious about AI. It costs nothing and might be the thing that shifts how they think about it.