The number that should worry every small employer
MYOB’s 2026 Business Monitor, published on 3 August, lands a single figure that ought to concentrate the mind of anyone running a small business. AI adoption sits at 64% among firms with 20-plus staff, against just 30% for businesses with one to five employees. That is a 34-percentage-point chasm, not a rounding difference. Overall SME adoption crept up to 36%, from 32% a year earlier.
The reason this matters more here than almost anywhere is scale. Ninety-seven percent of New Zealand businesses have fewer than 20 employees. The cohort showing the weakest uptake is not a niche. It is the overwhelming bulk of the country’s business population. When larger rivals adopt faster and the small firms hesitate, the gap does not stay static – it compounds.
What the delay actually costs
This is where the story stops being about software and starts being about money. A 2degrees and Deloitte Access Economics study released in April 2026 put the first NZ-specific price on the gap. The average AI-adopting SME earned roughly $400,000 more in FY25 than a comparable non-adopter. For large businesses the premium ballooned to about $59.1 million. Larger firms are not just adopting faster, they are banking exponentially bigger returns.
A note of honesty is warranted. A May 2026 parliamentary committee report put the revenue premium attributable to AI at a more sober 4.3% for SMEs and 4.8% for large firms, and cautioned that the headline figures do not control for whether adopters were already outperforming. The returns are real but not uniformly transformative. Still, in an economy where labour productivity fell 0.7% and GDP per capita dropped 1.3% over the study period, AI is one of the few levers pointing the right way.
The sole operator plot twist
Here is the detail that undercuts any excuse about size. Sole operators posted 36% adoption – outperforming the one-to-five employee firms sitting on 30%. When there is literally no one else to absorb the admin, the productivity case becomes impossible to ignore.
MYOB’s Dean Chadwick framed the smallest firms’ bind plainly, saying “small businesses are often tight on time and resources, so any solution that can take care of admin and offer efficiency gains as they look to grow can make all the difference.” On the standout cohort he added that “sole operators, in particular, recognise the potential AI offers to help them do more with less.”
Using ChatGPT is not the same as being AI-enabled
The MYOB data says small firms are not adopting fast enough. A separate finding says many that do adopt are flying blind. The Employers and Manufacturers Association surveyed more than 300 member businesses in July 2026 and found 83% already using AI in some form, but only 13% with an AI policy in place. Leadership teams drove adoption in only one-third of businesses, and HR led it in a mere 4%.
EMA Head of Marketing and Transformation Lisa Dean warned that “AI may help people work more efficiently and uncover new insights, but it is people who provide the context, make the decisions, build relationships and drive innovation.” Both problems – the non-adopters and the ungoverned adopters – point to the same outcome, which is productivity gains left on the table.
The trans-Tasman question
The uncomfortable comparison is with Australia. Government analysis published in August 2025 cited a 2024 survey finding 68% of NZ SMEs had no plans to evaluate or invest in AI, against just 38% across the Tasman. Two economies that share a language, legal systems and broadly similar conditions, split by 30 points. That points to something structural in New Zealand’s settings, not a general Anglophone reluctance. NZ’s larger businesses are doing fine – a 2024 Datacom survey found 67% of them using some form of AI. It is the small end that is stuck.
This is not a story that needs a villain. The barriers small firms cite are time scarcity, data-privacy trust and unclear implementation paths, not cost or scepticism. The belief is there. The action is not. For owner-managers the takeaway is blunt – occasional dabbling in a chatbot is not building an AI-enabled business, and the rivals with 20-plus staff are not waiting. The gap is being decided now, one quarter at a time, and it is quietly favouring the firms that already had the resources to move first.
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