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Applied AI·July 21, 2026·1 min read

New data claims small businesses haven't expanded their use of AI in the past few years

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SMBs stalling at “basic automation” is a demand problem, not an awareness problem—horizontal AI tools aren’t mapping cleanly to specific small-business jobs-to-be-done. If you sell into SMB, narrow your AI pitch to 1–2 concrete workflows with clear ROI instead of generic productivity narratives.

Applied AI

Docs: AI data startup Mercor had $614M in gross revenue in H1 2026, up 70% from all of 2025, with ~91% from foundation model makers like OpenAI and Anthropic

A three-year-old data vendor doing $614 million in H1 revenue — 91% from top model labs — shows that high-quality human feedback is a primary cost center in frontier model training. If you’re not a lab, expect tighter competition and higher prices for the same annotator and evaluator capacity you need for your own systems.