The Hidden 58%: How UK SMBs Can Unlock Their True Growth Potential

New report reveals more than half of small business growth in the UK goes unrealised — but AI is emerging as a powerful lever for reclaiming it.

The Untapped Opportunity: £121,000 in Growth per Business

 A new Report from Intuit, conducted in partnership with Dr Chris Brauer of Goldsmiths, University of London, and Symmetry Research, has uncovered that up to 58% of SMB growth potential goes unrealised.

For the average UK business, that translates to an average of £121,272 in lost revenue each year per company, rising to more than £416,000 for mid-sized firms. This shortfall, what we call the “Growth Gap”, represents an enormous opportunity for both individual businesses and the wider UK economy.

What’s Holding Businesses Back?

The study found that most leaders are ambitious and optimistic about the future, but daily pressures often trap that ambition in operational drag.

• Operational overload: Nearly 40% of UK SMB leaders are almost always involved in day-to-day operations, leaving little time for strategy.

• Decision fatigue: Leaders lose 5–6 hours each week to decision fatigue, with over a third missing growth opportunities as a result.

• Tool sprawl: Owners spend nearly a full working day switching between seven to nine different digital tools.

• Lost innovation: Three in four businesses have abandoned growth ideas in the past year due to limited time, focus, or capital.

These challenges combine to widen the Growth Gap, limiting the potential for innovation, productivity, and profit.

The Readiness Divide: A New Measure of Growth

To help SMBs better understand what drives success, the study introduces a Growth Readiness Scorecard. It categorises businesses into three key groups:

• High Readiness (39%): Agile, data-driven, and strategically flexible firms ready to scale.

• Emerging Readiness (34%):  Stable but beginning to feel strain.

• Low Readiness (27%): Constrained by outdated systems, financial pressures, and burnout.

Businesses in the high-readiness category aren’t necessarily the biggest, but they are the most connected and adaptable. According to the research, improving readiness across the SMB economy could lift total revenue by nearly 8% each year.

AI: The Great Rebalancer

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as the most powerful lever for closing the Growth Gap.

• 40% of UK SMBs now use AI across finance, marketing, and operations.

• 80% of leaders say AI helps them delegate more effectively while staying in control.

• 40% already save 5–8 hours each week through automation, freeing time for innovation, strategy, and customer engagement.

Firms using multiple AI tools are also far more likely to fall into the high-readiness group, and consistently report fewer barriers to growth, highlighting how digital confidence and  readiness reinforce each other.

As Ciarán Quilty, Senior Vice President for International at Intuit, explains:

As Leigh Thomas, Vice President EMEA at Intuit, explains:

Closing the Growth Gap

The research underscores a simple but powerful truth: SMBs don’t lack ambition, they lack bandwidth.

By embracing connected tools and AI-powered automation, business leaders can reclaim time, restore focus, and reimagine growth. When everyday work runs smoothly, ambition can finally become action.

At Intuit , we’re committed to helping businesses close that gap, transforming hidden potential into real progress. That’s why we’ve announced the global availability of AI agents on the all-in one-Intuit platform, creating a more powerful QuickBooks experience.

Now available to QuickBooks customers, a powerful, proactive team of AI agents and trusted human experts work together across the Intuit platform to handle repetitive tasks, surface insights, and support collaboration between business owners and their accounting professionals. These include:

• Accounting Agent: Automates bookkeeping and categorisation to help keep accounts clean and accurate. It identifies anomalies early, while facilitating seamless collaboration with your accounting professional.

• Customer Agent: Helps you find leads directly from your inbox, prioritises high-value opportunities, drafts personalised responses, books meetings, and tracks opportunities across the full sales cycle. 

• Finance Agent: Helps you deliver comprehensive financial summaries, including profit and loss, cash flow and balance sheets.

• Projects Agent: Accelerates setup by helping to auto-fill key details for draft projects, and reducing the need for manual data entry.

• VAT AI Agent (Beta): Helps customers stay compliant by flagging for review differences between income on the Profit and Loss statement, and net sales amounts on the VAT return. It also suggests likely causes for these differences, and proposes solutions.

These new experiences are accompanied by a completely redesigned and personalised QuickBooks web layout. The homepage is transformed into a display of customisable widgets with a business feed that shows real-time insights, recommendations, and summarises the workflows and tasks completed by the AI agents. Customers can collaborate with their trusted experts, and connect to additional products, services, and third-party apps. For more information visit here.

Disclaimer: Functionality will vary depending on plans. While available in all QuickBooks supported languages, the AI Agent's output will be English-only at launch. We recommend you review all outputs carefully.

This information is intended to outline our general product direction, but represents no obligation and should not be relied on in making a purchasing decision. Additional terms, conditions and fees may apply with certain features and functionality. Eligibility criteria may apply. Product offers, features, and functionality are subject to change without notice.