Make your AI strategy competitive

Short answer: for a small or medium-sized business, the question isn't whether to use AI but where to start without wasting time or money. Accenture's research on the companies pulling ahead points to a few habits any business can copy, and a useful AI strategy comes down to three questions: where AI adds value to what you already do well, what it will realistically cost, and in what order to move.

Every week brings another headline about AI transforming business. For most small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the real question isn't whether to adopt AI. It's where to start.

The good news is that the research is clear and the opportunity is real. The challenge is knowing which moves matter most for your size and sector.

The value gap may work for you

Over the past decade, $27 trillion in enterprise value changed hands globally as AI reshaped competitive advantage. The pace has doubled since 2022, in what Accenture calls the Age of AI. Businesses that acted early, embedding AI into their revenue models, operations and customer relationships, captured outsized gains. Those that waited found the gap harder to close.

"One in five of the world's largest companies by revenue weren't even on the list in 2015." Accenture, The Great Value Migration

This disruption isn't exclusive to global corporations. The same dynamics play out at every scale. The businesses pulling ahead aren't always the biggest. They're the ones that made deliberate choices about where AI could unlock hidden value in what they already had.

What "value leader" behaviour looks like at SME scale

Accenture's analysis of over 1,300 companies found that the highest-performing businesses share a set of characteristics. Four of them apply directly to a smaller business:

• Hunt value in existing assets. Rather than building new products from scratch, they find smarter ways to make money from what they already have: customer data, repeat relationships, specialist knowledge.
• Sell outcomes, not features. Instead of describing what they do, they show what changes for the customer. AI tools help them track and communicate results more precisely.
• Build recurring relationships. Value over several years comes from loyalty and embedded service, not one-off transactions.
• Speed up innovation. Not by spending more on research and development, but by using AI to test ideas faster and drop the ones that won't work.

The strategic trap: doing too much, too vaguely

The most common mistake SMEs make with AI is trying to act on everything at once with no clear priority. A useful AI strategy for an SME answers three questions:

1. Where does AI add value to what we already do well?
2. What's the realistic cost and effort, and what do we expect to see in the first month?
3. In what order should we move?

Those three questions are the foundation of a strategy you can actually carry out.

Try it in ten minutes

The AI Strategy Generator from AI for Growth is built for exactly this. It looks up your business first, asks four questions tailored to your sector and size, and hands back three ranked actions, each with a rough cost, effort level and a realistic first-month expectation. It's a starting point that reflects your actual business, in about ten minutes.

Try the AI Strategy Generator →

Source: written by Accenture for AI for Growth. Figures and quote from Accenture, The Great Value Migration.