Three moves to grow your revenue share
S
01 The Three Rungs framework
Where are you actually standing today?
Deloitte Access Economics measured 1,000+ Australian SMBs against an AI Maturity Index. The bands below are how they group up. Find your honest rung first. Choose the move that gets you to the next one.
Rung 1
Basic
One or two people experiment with AI for personal tasks. No shared prompts. No standard tools. No measurement. AI is a private hobby, not a business practice.
Rung 2
Intermediate
A handful of workflows touched (proposals, customer emails, summaries). Tooling is mixed. Some training has happened. Results are real but uneven across the team.
Rung 3
Enabled
AI is built into core processes. Team trained on how to use it well. Data is centralised enough that AI has something useful to read. Outcomes are measured.
Weak vs strong move · Weak: "We need an AI strategy." Strong: "We are at intermediate. The single move that gets us to enabled is centralising customer records into one system the AI tool can actually read. That alone gets you the next 30% of value."
02 Three moves any SMB can run this quarter
Move 01
Pick one revenue process. Make AI a standard step in it.
Proposals, quotes, follow-up emails, lead qualification. Choose one customer-facing process where speed or quality directly affects close rate. Document what "good" looks like, then run every output through AI before it leaves the building. This is the single highest-impact move for moving from basic to intermediate.
"We doubled our proposal turnaround time. The proposals also got better, not just faster."
Move 02
Centralise the data your AI tool needs to see.
The Deloitte report calls out business systems and data quality as barrier #2. Most SMBs do not need fancy systems. You need your customer records, pricing, and recent quotes in one place an AI assistant can actually read. Spreadsheets count. Pulling three systems into one shared folder counts. This is what gets you from intermediate to enabled.
"The AI was not slow. It was blind. It could not see half our information."
Move 03
Train your team for 90 minutes on the right two prompts.
Only 10% of SMB workforces have advanced AI skills, but you do not need advanced. You need every person on your team to know the two prompts that apply to their role and to use them weekly. Pick the two highest-impact tasks per role. Write the prompt template. Run a 90-minute working session. That is your AI training program.
"Three weeks in, the team stopped asking me about AI and just used it."
03 The five barriers Deloitte identified
All five are solvable. None require a multi-year program.
Source: Deloitte Access Economics, The AI edge for small business, November 2025. Survey of 1,000+ Australian SMBs.
01
Not knowing where to start
02
Business systems and data quality
03
Workforce skills and training
04
Funding and ROI clarity
05
Governance and standards
Free 30-minute consultation — no pitch, no jargon
If reading this made you think "I wonder which rung we are actually on, and what the one move is for us" - that is the right instinct and the right starting point. In 30 minutes I can help you identify your honest rung, the single highest-impact move from where you stand, and whether it is worth doing this quarter or next. I will tell you straight if there is nothing worth doing right now.
Sources
Deloitte Access Economics, The AI edge for small business, 25 November 2025 · deloitte.com/au/en/about/press-room/ai-edge-small-business-increased-smb-ai-adoption-can-add-44-billion-australias-economy-251125.html
Stanford HAI, AI Index Report 2025 · hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report
Stanford HAI, AI Index Report 2025 · hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2025-ai-index-report
Sujit Kumar
AI Strategist & Practitioner · Perth WA
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