If you signed up for ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot or one of the other AI tools over the past year or two, you’re in good company. Most small businesses have at least one AI subscription now. Whether those subscriptions are actually delivering anything useful is a different question, and worth considering before the next renewal comes around.
I use AI tools every day and find them genuinely useful – for drafting, problem-solving or generating a first pass at something I’d otherwise spend an hour on. But I’m also talking to small business owners who signed up because it seemed like the right move, used the tool a handful of times, and haven’t really thought about it since. The subscription renews automatically and six months later they’re not really sure what to use it for.
This tends to happen when a tool gets adopted without a clear problem to solve.
Why AI tools often underdeliver
Earlier this year, research from MIT’s NANDA initiative found that despite massive investment in AI tools, only around 5% of AI projects were reaching the point of delivering measurable business impact. The sample was enterprise-level organisations, not small businesses, but the core finding translates directly.
The tools that failed did so because they weren’t integrated into how people actually worked. They required switching between systems, re-entering information, and remembering to use them. An AI tool that lives alongside your workflow rather than inside it delivers much less value than one that fits naturally into how you already operate.
For a small business owner, this usually looks like: you use ChatGPT to draft something occasionally, but you don’t have a consistent process for it, you haven’t told it much about your business, and every session starts from scratch.
Three things to check before you renew
Before you renew, expand or add another tool, there are three things to check.
- What problem you were trying to solve when you signed up? Is the answer a variation of “I wanted to keep up with what everyone was doing” or “the demo looked impressive”? Tools adopted without a clear problem to solve tend to get used inconsistently and deliver inconsistent results – not a reason to cancel, but a reason to get clearer about what you actually need.
- Whether you’re actually using it, and for what? If you opened it twice last month to draft an email and weren’t happy with the result, that’s different than if you’re using it daily to produce content, answer customer enquiries or save time on research. The pattern of actual use is the clearest indicator of whether the tool fits your situation.
- Is it set up for your business, or are you starting from scratch every session? Most AI tools can be configured with information about your business, such as tone of voice and writing preferences, services and business audience. Without that configuration the output is generic, and it will sound like it. With it, the output is significantly more useful and much closer to something you’d actually send or publish.
What to do if it’s not working
If you’re paying for an AI subscription and not getting much from it, the answer isn’t necessarily to cancel it. It’s more likely that the tool hasn’t been configured properly for your situation, or that you haven’t identified the specific tasks where it would actually save you time.
A practical one-on-one session to work through exactly this – what tools you have, what you’re trying to achieve, and how to set things up so they actually work for your business – is what the AI Adoption service at WebSolutionZ covers.
For a plain-English overview of what AI tools actually do well and where they fall short, what is AI and how can it help my small business is a useful starting point.
