The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) among small businesses is growing, but perhaps not in the way most people think. According to new data from PayPal and Reimagine Main Street1, AI isn’t just being explored; it’s already working behind the scenes inside small businesses across the country. Today, 76% of small businesses are either actively using or exploring AI. For 25% of businesses that are current AI users, AI is already embedded in daily operations—primarily to enhance marketing, increase worker productivity, and drive product and service innovation.
Perhaps most significantly, 82% of small businesses think adopting AI is essential to stay competitive in today’s business environment. Yet, a gap remains between interest and action—many are still unsure where to start, how to implement tools effectively, or whether the ROI will follow.
“The roadblock isn’t desire, but rather time, clarity, and confidence,” says Michelle Gill, GM of Small Business and Financial Services at PayPal. While many entrepreneurs are unsure where to start—especially under pressure from shifting demand and economic headwinds—Gill is confident that AI adoption will accelerate as AI tools become easier to use and drive even better results.
“The interesting thing is how quickly AI users become power users,” she says. “If it works and it’s generating results, then your desire to push the envelope increases.”
Agentic AI—intelligent software agents that manage and execute tasks like marketing and customer engagement with little human involvement required—will help spark that desire. Here are three practical ways small businesses can begin leveraging agentic AI to stay competitive.
1. Automate marketing and content
AI is already hard at work creating and personalizing marketing for small businesses. Among current users, 91% of respondents said they use it to generate content, and 84% feel comfortable fully automating marketing creation. This can include using AI to create blog posts, product descriptions, marketing copy, email copy, social media, and other communication support. For many owners, that’s the first place they delegate work to AI, so they can focus on growth, not grammar.
For example, take Katrina and Shaun G., owners of an artisan bakery and coffee business in Augusta, GA. They primarily use AI tools for marketing tasks like social media content creation and photo enhancement. They say they view AI as a game-changing tool for saving time and generating ideas. “After I used it a couple times, I’m like, what did I wait for? This is amazing,” Shaun G. explains. “It’s still my words just said differently—in a way that I didn’t have to think of.”
Imagine an online boutique using an AI agent to analyze recent customer behavior alongside real-time inventory. In seconds, it could generate and publish tailored content across channels—launching an email campaign for back-in-stock favorites, updating a homepage banner with seasonal trends, or scheduling social posts that spotlight products aligned with emerging style preferences. The result: relevant and timely content—delivered automatically, with minimal effort from the business owner.
By analyzing user data and predicting preferences, Gill says agentic AI goes beyond basic content creation, developing personalized messages in emails and other communications to make product recommendations, remind customers about birthdays, holidays, recurring purchases, and more. “You could send the exact same email to everyone, but you probably rather use personalized, trigger emails to help stimulate demand,” Gill explains.
2. Streamline customer support and operations
According to PayPal’s survey data, nearly 60% of AI-using small businesses are comfortable automating customer service inquiries, and 40% say they are open to handing off scheduling inventory management.
Gill says these businesses are clear candidates for agentic tools that run quietly in the background and help deliver support and operations at scale, without requiring the owner to be online 24 hours a day, seven days a week. AI agents can automate responses to customer inquiries (answering customer questions, resetting passwords, etc.) and automate scheduling (either for booking customer appointments or overseeing and reordering inventory).
Consider a residential cleaning business with multiple crews and a rotating list of clients. An AI agent could coordinate appointment scheduling across teams, automatically confirm bookings, and manage last-minute changes helping to reduce no-shows and ensure timely service. It could also track supply usage, like cleaning products or paper goods, and reorder items before they run low, so teams never arrive unprepared. The result: fewer scheduling errors, consistent service quality, and happier clients. The business owner can stay focused on staffing and customer relationships while the AI helps keep operations running smoothly.
“When you see customers have higher levels of satisfaction, and it doesn’t necessitate you spending the time doing it, this gives you back extra hours in the day,” Gill says.
Saving time and improving results is important to Jenay A., owner of a yoga studio and wellness tourism business in Lake Tahoe, Calif. She says she would benefit from an agentic AI tool that can analyze business metrics related to tourism—such as weather predictions and airline schedules—to help her predict busy periods and target customers when they’re considering booking trips to Tahoe.
“To have an AI assistant that says, ‘here’s what we’re looking at for this summer, here’s the number of people coming to Tahoe, here’s how many people looked for wellness experiences,’ that’d be so lovely,” she says.
3. Optimize pricing and cash flow
In the survey, more than half of AI-using small businesses say a cash-flow forecasting agent would solve a critical pain point. Another 40% are “extremely likely” to adopt tools that dynamically adjust pricing and promotions based on real-time buying behavior.
Agentic AI tools can help SMBs answer questions that are historically difficult to track in real time: When should I raise prices? Which products are over-discounted? Will I run out of cash in Q3 if I hire one more person? Agentic AI is positioned to answer these questions automatically, using sales trends, seasonal patterns, and even competitor pricing data—without the owner needing to run a spreadsheet.
Take a seasonal retail business—like a beachside gear rental shop—that sees big swings in demand. An AI agent could track historical sales, local weather forecasts, and competitor pricing to automatically adjust hourly rates or flag upcoming cash flow gaps. Instead of manually guessing how to set prices week to week, the owner gets real-time recommendations that balance profitability with customer demand.
These types of tools are especially valuable for businesses with fluctuating sales cycles or slim profit margins, where even small pricing or cash flow missteps can have an outsized impact.
So far, Gill says adoption of agentic AI for these purposes hasn’t been high among small businesses, but that will change once the availability of these tools proliferates. “Adoption will grow. Businesses will move from the simplest use cases to the more advanced over time and so, to me, this is just a matter of time.”
Building AI into the small-business ecosystem
With these capabilities on the horizon, what will it take for small businesses to embrace emerging agentic potential? Four in five small businesses say they’ll embrace AI if it’s baked into the tools they already use rather than a standalone platform.
Recognizing these shifting needs, PayPal is making AI agents available in the tools small businesses already rely on. “Shopping as we know it on web and mobile services is going to change,” Gill says.
To help shape the future of agentic commerce, PayPal is working with leading AI platforms—including its recently announced collaboration with Perplexity—to create tools that help small businesses reach and convert customers more effectively. They are exploring partnerships that are powering intelligent AI agents capable of surfacing products, personalizing offers, and streamlining the path to purchase within the platforms small businesses already use.
“We are committed to advancing technologies—from voice- and chatbot-driven shopping to seamless, single-click checkouts—that will empower small businesses to scale rapidly and offer customers an intuitive, secure experience,” Gill says.
And PayPal’s other tools—such as tokenized wallets and PayPal Invoicing—can complement existing AI tools to help small businesses scale quickly and efficiently. “We get excited about both the merchant side of bringing inventory and order management to bear and then also powering that payment and keeping the reliability consumers have come to expect from PayPal,” Gill says.
Click here to discover the ways PayPal is helping small businesses compete—and thrive—in the age of autonomous commerce.
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This article is for informational purposes only and contains forward-looking statements, projections and assumptions. These are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results may vary.
1 A report from Reimagine Main Street, a project of Public Private Strategies Institute in partnership with PayPal, surveyed nearly 1,000 small businesses with annual revenue between $25,000 and $5,000,000.
