EF News
By Elaine Stroud, CEO of the Entrepreneurs’ Forum
For the past couple of years, the conversation around AI in business has focused on adoption, which businesses are using it, and which tools.
Our latest Entrepreneurs’ Forum member Pulse Survey suggests we are moving into a new phase. Of the 113 entrepreneurs who responded, 97% are using AI in some form. But more interestingly, more than a quarter now say AI is embedded across multiple areas of their business, with a further 18% deliberately changing workflows and processes to integrate it, and 12% expecting to hire fewer people as a result.
Businesses are investing in AI too. Almost 90% of AI users have made a meaningful investment. That includes subscriptions to ChatGPT and Claude, but increasingly internal time to explore opportunities, staff training, and external expertise.
Buying an AI subscription is easy. Changing the way a business works because of technology is much harder. It requires leaders to understand their processes, identify where time can be saved, decide where AI can genuinely add value and, importantly, where human judgement remains essential.
Encouragingly, businesses are increasingly seeing a return for doing that work. Almost nine in ten AI users in our survey say they are experiencing measurable benefits.
For a third, that means saving up to five hours across the business each week. Another third report productivity or operational efficiencies equivalent to between five and 20 hours, and almost one in four report company benefits of more than 50 hours saved each week.
An hour saved writing a proposal, analysing a spreadsheet or turning meeting notes into actions may not sound transformational. But when you repeat those gains across a team and hundreds of tasks over a year, it can make a big difference.
Right now, research is the most common application among our members, followed by marketing content and capturing meeting notes. Entrepreneurs are using AI to help them prepare proposals and tenders, summarise long documents, draft emails, analyse numbers, and challenge their thinking.
A third are also using it to write code or create internal tools and automations, which starts to show where the value of AI is heading. For many businesses, the immediate opportunity may not be enormous transformation projects. It could be hundreds of relatively small improvements to the way everyday work gets done. But that raises the question about what happens to the people doing that work.
Our survey provides the beginnings of an answer, but I think this is an area we will be watching closely over the next few years.
For most entrepreneurs, AI has not changed their recruitment plans. 19% say they expect to hire people with different skills because of AI, 12% expect to employ fewer people, and 59% anticipate no change. The impact of AI on employment is often discussed as a fairly simplistic question of whether technology will replace jobs, but the reality is more complicated.
If AI removes some repetitive or administrative elements of a role, the value of other skills changes. Judgement, communication, creativity, commercial understanding, and the ability to ask the right questions could become more important, not less.
Businesses may also find themselves recruiting people who are simply better at working alongside these tools. This makes AI increasingly a leadership question: to define where it should be used, what should be automated, and what should remain human.
There is a lot to work out, but what we see among North East entrepreneurs suggests AI is becoming part of everyday business. The opportunity is not simply to use it, but to make deliberate choices about where it can free up time, improve decisions, and create capacity for the work where people add the most value.
