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Every year, Squarespace surveys entrepreneurs to better understand how small business owners work and the challenges they’re facing. While there’s no shortage of reporting around artificial intelligence these days, we wanted to get down to the nuts and bolts of its impact on business owners: How are entrepreneurs actually using AI? What tools or insights are they missing, and what can they and the companies that serve them—like Squarespace—do to prepare for the future?
We surveyed more than 1,200 entrepreneurs across six different countries who are selling physical products, digital content, or services to clients online, both using Squarespace and without Squarespace.
What we found was a growing interest in AI and an acceptance of its staying power, but a lack of guidance on how to use it effectively.
- AI knowledge is indispensable. 66% of respondents believe AI will be very or extremely important for running a successful business in the next 5 years.
- It’s not just about saving time, but the impact of time saved. Business owners like AI because it gives them more time for creative or customer-facing work. 48% of responses said it reduced their stress/burnout and 44% said it saved them money.
- The quality of output matters. In responses, entrepreneurs emphasized that professional, brand-aligned AI output is a differentiator. 42% say that customers are more engaged with content they created with AI.
- There are some education gaps. 90% of those surveyed use AI for copy generation, but half worry about generic outputs. Business owners need guidance on how to get the most out of tools, and companies need to build features that raise the bar.
AI is becoming a must-have, not a nice-to-have
If you’ve been paying attention to news and marketing cycles around AI, you’ve heard about all of the proposed benefits: time savings, access to new skills (e.g., vibe coding), and cost savings. Our survey showed that to be true:
70% of entrepreneurs estimated AI saves them up to 10 hours per week
54% said they’ve used it to learn a new skill or subject
44% say it’s helped them cut costs
But AI isn’t just making some tasks faster and cheaper. The real-life impact of those benefits is helping businesses grow and reshaping relationships with work. Those results are what gives business owners using AI a strategic edge.
Entrepreneurs we surveyed reported that using AI had a positive impact on all of their stated business goals. It was called out as especially helpful for growing audience and market share, and bringing a unique product or service to life.
One of the biggest themes across responses was AI’s impact on business owners’ confidence. Entrepreneurs credited AI with making them feel more secure in customer communications, SEO, and copywriting, among other tasks. A majority of those surveyed—65%—think AI will help them compete with larger brands or competitors long-term.
Not only do the entrepreneurs we surveyed feel positively about AI’s impact on their business, it’s also paying off for them on a human level. Almost half of those we surveyed—48%—said AI has helped to reduce their stress or burnout.
“65% think AI will help them compete with larger brands or competitors long-term.”
AI could reshape customer experience
As more business owners incorporate AI into their workflows, it’s also changing how customers interact with businesses. Whether entrepreneurs explicitly share that they’re using AI or not, it’s driving results:
42% said customers are more engaged with their content
34% said customers are more satisfied with their products, services, or support
32% said customers are getting faster responses
Other entrepreneurs shared that their customers are getting more personalized interaction, which increases satisfaction. Less than a fifth of respondents reported that AI had any negative impact on customer perceptions of their business.
The flipside of this is that customers could become accustomed to faster responses and higher-quality content or interactions. That’s not a negative thing, but it could change customer experience expectations for small businesses across the board. That change could leave business owners with a weaker experience at a disadvantage as their competitors adopt AI tooling or new tactics to meet rising expectations.
There are still gaps on both sides
Adoption and development of AI tools has increased rapidly, but it’s still a relatively new set of tools and technology for many people. That can leave something to be desired in output quality and product education, but both companies and entrepreneurs have an opportunity to fill that space.
The trust gap
As the positives of AI grow, some common concerns persist around trusting AI tools with sensitive data and the quality of AI-generated results. Of the people we surveyed:
50% identified generic output as a top concern
44% said they’re worried about data privacy with AI
39% said AI-generated content can require heavy editing
34% said they didn’t feel comfortable trusting it with important decisions
These are common concerns, even within tech spaces. Technology experts generally warn against entering any confidential or personal identifying information into an AI tool.
Experts also point out that AI can hallucinate, or make up information when it doesn’t have a clear answer. This has been true in our own testing, with AI sometimes hallucinating errors in URLs and numbers.
But there are things that both companies and entrepreneurs can do to improve AI-generated results. For companies with the resourcing and expertise to curate their AI tools, there’s an opportunity to differentiate themselves by creating more intentional outputs for their users. For example, Squarespace offers this with its AI website builder, training it behind the scenes to ensure the layouts, images, and copy generated are of equal quality to what you’d get from a predesigned Squarespace template.
For entrepreneurs, it’s important to stay up to date on AI’s developing strengths and weaknesses and adjust your processes accordingly. Beyond data safety and fact checking, even the best AI isn’t going to perfectly replicate the human factors that make your business stand out and keep customers coming back. Anything that goes in front of customers should get a human review for brand relevance and uniqueness.
The knowledge gap
Common AI tools most people are familiar with are powered by large language models (LLMs), which generate content by predicting the most likely next piece of information until they form a complete sentence, image, or response. It’s not surprising then, that copywriting is the main AI use we found among those we surveyed:
69% of entrepreneurs use AI to write content
62% use it for coming up with content ideas
55% use it to create website copy
54% use it to brainstorm new products, services, or strategies
Across the top five copy-related use cases, 90% of those surveyed said they use AI for copy generation. But a much smaller percentage use AI for more advanced functions: Only 27% use it for financial management and 25% for demand forecasting or inventory management.
That more than half of the people we surveyed use AI to brainstorm new strategies or ideas suggests that there’s a desire to apply AI to more deep thinking. But the actual usage among respondents doesn’t reflect broad application of that yet. It’s possible that this is in part because performing more complex tasks with AI, and getting quality output for them, requires more experience with prompt engineering.
The concerns about generic content and content that requires heavy editing also hint at that experience gap. In chatbots, you can provide more detailed and specific prompt instructions or create custom versions with knowledge bases trained on your brand and voice. But there’s no built-in guide for learning that information, how to get started, or how to apply it to a small business.
Entrepreneurs who reported positive experiences with AI appeared to view the technology as more of a sounding board and business associate than a simple generation tool. Many reported that AI helped them achieve results they wouldn’t have with their own level of experience, or that it introduced ideas they wouldn’t have thought of otherwise.
For entrepreneurs who want to explore additional use cases, like analyzing data sets for customer insights or inventory forecasting, there’s an opportunity to seek out more education, webinars, or workshops on AI tools.
An underacknowledged factor is also that small business owners are juggling dozens of tasks and responsibilities at any given time. That makes it harder to pick up new tools or dedicate time to developing prompting skillsets.
For organizations targeting entrepreneurs and business owners, this is a clear opportunity to offer more support. Educational content can help business owners get up to speed, and there’s a distinct advantage to offering intelligent tools that perform these more complex tasks—at a high quality—for businesses, so they don’t need to set aside time to self-train.
Looking to the future: What’s in store for entrepreneurs?
No matter how AI technology evolves—whether it becomes as powerful as tech leaders imagine or one of many tools to leverage for success—our survey clearly shows that it’s changing how people work and what customers expect out of businesses.
This year’s survey found that entrepreneurs’ top goals remain unchanged from our 2024 report. But about half feel confident that AI will impact how some of them go about achieving those goals in the next five years.
57% believe it’ll change the skills they need to succeed
50% trust AI for certain tasks more than an employee
46% think AI could make or break their business
What does all of this actually mean for entrepreneurs? The bigger picture isn’t a headline-grabbing story about replacing employees and upending small business as we know it. It’s one where automation and smart tooling meets original ideas, to build better products and happier business owners and customers.
The majority of those who responded still place a high value in an MBA or equivalent degree, a signal that AI isn’t replacing fundamental business principles and professional networking.
And while much of the mainstream conversation revolves around AI taking jobs away, 53% of those we surveyed also think it’ll make starting a business more accessible. That could create new pathways for aspiring entrepreneurs to launch side businesses, pivot from corporate careers, and pick up new skills.
An action plan for entrepreneurs
It’s worth exploring where AI can make your work easier or more impactful, and a great way to do that is hands-on education and experimentation. Here are six things you can do right now to future-proof yourself and your business as AI evolves.
Understand how AI works. If you want to apply AI effectively, make sure you have a clear sense of what types of AI are out there, how they work, and their best applications.
Stay informed. New products and changes are announced daily. Find a newsletter, small business group, or company you trust to keep you in the loop.
Know how your customers are using AI. Even if you’re an AI skeptic, your customers and clients might not be. Understand how AI search, chatbots, and browsers could impact how people discover and buy from you and optimize your site for AI crawlers.
Be clear about your brand. Among a rush of generic AI content, unique voices, designs, and ideas will rise to the top. You and your brand are what build trust and keep people coming back—don’t let it get lost in the rush to apply new technologies.
Look at your current toolkit. You don’t have to do it alone. Find out if platforms you already use offer high-quality AI tools. Well-designed features can save you time perfecting prompts and jumping between platforms.
Test and evaluate. Not every AI tool is right for every task, and not every task needs AI applied to it. Experiment with the many tools out there to learn the ropes and decide whether they’re right for you.
How Squarespace can support you
The teams behind Squarespace care deeply about making it easier for entrepreneurs to make their ideas real and succeed. That’s the ethos behind Design Intelligence, our approach to applying AI to the Squarespace platform. We don’t launch AI features just to say we have them. We use our resources and expert knowledge to apply AI thoughtfully, so you get the best possible outputs and see real results long-term.
If you want to do more with AI, explore these functionalities and more on Squarespace to find out what possibilities they can open up for your business:
AI SEO tool: Scan your website for missing SEO copy and automatically generate optimized text to fill the gaps to optimize your site for AI search (AIO) and search visibility.
AI website builder: Build a website using an interactive AI experience informed by our decades of design expertise, with step-by-step previews and curated choices to retain your creative control.
Design guidance: Get layout recommendations and more guided by the same powerful AI found in the AI website builder.
Copy generation and Brand Identity: Use the built-in AI writer across the platform to draft and edit copy, and personalize its output by describing your brand voice in your Brand Identity settings.
AI Product Composer: Upload a photo or description of a product or service to automatically get a suggested price, description, and SEO copy.
AI might change how you get the work done or how customers find out about you, but the fundamentals of a successful, meaningful business are the same. Technology can make you more visible, but your passion, unique ideas, and great design are what build connections and fuel real growth.
Squarespace is committed to building tools—AI-powered and otherwise—and education that supports every part of the entrepreneurial journey. You can learn more in our AIO and AI content hubs or watch a webinar featuring members of our Product team.
This survey was conducted by Squarespace in May 2025 to gather insights on AI usage among entrepreneurs.
A total of 1,205 respondents, including both Squarespace users (n=605) and non-Squarespace users (n=600), participated and were screened to ensure relevance to the target audience. Respondents represented people who sell products or services online in North America, the United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and France.
While the data provides directional insight, limitations include potential biases from self-reporting and sample representation.