How AI can help private businesses grow, adapt and compete

Private businesses have spent decades building competitive advantage through entrepreneurial leadership, trusted relationships, and the ability to adapt quickly to change. AI now offers an opportunity to amplify those strengths.

Many already recognise that potential. Our latest data from the PwC 12th Global Family Business Survey shows that 60% view AI as a primary growth driver. Yet recognising the opportunity is not the same as capturing it. In our experience, many businesses are still struggling to turn interest into impact. Too few businesses are seeing measurable returns—a pattern we also see in listed companies. However, we see a small group pulling ahead.

In this article, we look at where AI can create value for your business, the strengths private businesses can build on, the barriers that can slow progress, and the steps that can help you get started.

Used well, AI can help you:

• modernise and streamline operations
• scale and supercharge your existing workforce
• improve decision-making and respond faster to change
• deepen customer relationships through faster turnaround times
• free up leadership and employee capacity for higher-value work
• scale expertise without scaling headcount at the same rate
• strengthen what makes your business distinctive without losing the personal touch
• spot new opportunities for growth, innovation and business model reinvention

You can already see this in practice: software companies using it to help write code, law firms to give legal advice, insurers using AI to process claims more quickly and find fraud, and retailers deploying AI to personalise customer marketing and product personalisation.

Broader CEO research also shows that some businesses are using AI not just to improve productivity, but to find new sources of growth. They are using AI to spot emerging value pools—particularly those centred on customer needs that call for new, cross-sector combinations of products and services. As industries converge to meet these needs, the rewards for companies that rethink their business models early are likely to grow.

The strengths you already rely on give you an edge in AI adoption.

Decision-making is often concentrated among a smaller group of leaders, making it easier to act when opportunities emerge. Many private businesses also have the advantage of patient capital, giving them more room to invest in capabilities that create value over the longer term rather than focusing solely on short-term returns.

If your business is founder-led or family-owned, you may already be used to testing ideas, adapting quickly and making decisions without perfect information. That mindset matters in a space like AI, where the technology is evolving fast and no one has all the answers upfront.

Many private businesses also sit close to their customers, suppliers and partners. Those relationships can create a level of trust and collaboration that is hard to replicate and can help new ideas gain traction more quickly. As AI increasingly reshapes value chains, that closeness can become a powerful source of competitive advantage.

So, if many private businesses are well placed to adopt AI, why is progress still proving difficult?

In our experience, the barriers are rarely a lack of interest, or even the cost of the technology. More often, it comes down to uncertainty, resistance to change, and a tendency to overcomplicate the first steps.

The market is crowded, the promises are noisy, and the headlines tend to swing between alarm and hype. That can make it hard to know where to begin—and easier for hesitation or resistance to set in. Many leaders are unsure which use cases matter most, or how to manage risks around privacy, security, and trust. As a result, some businesses take a wait-and-see approach.

Others are jumping straight to bespoke AI solutions, getting pulled into costly and risky custom builds too quickly. This is before proving value with the tools already in front of them, such as ChatGPT Enterprise, Microsoft Copilot, Claude and other enterprise-grade platforms. These can already unlock meaningful productivity, quality and innovation gains—and are a sensible first step.

Custom AI may eventually be the right answer, but not before an organisation has built basic AI fluency.

The businesses making the greatest progress are the ones clearest on where AI can help, using safe and scalable off-the-shelf tools well, putting the right guardrails in place, and focused on changing how work gets done.

Our AI Performance Survey shows that it is ‘AI fitness’ that makes the difference. AI fitness is not about having the most pilots, the biggest technology budget, or the most impressive custom build. It is the organisational capability to use AI well, safely, and repeatedly. In simple terms they are getting their people better at using it.

That means:

• treating AI adoption as a people and business initiative not a technology initiative
• pointing AI at the workflows and decisions that create real value
• building practical foundations across strategy, data, workforce, governance, trust and more
• embedding AI throughout the business, rather than leaving it in isolated pockets or innovation teams

The most AI fit companies in our research deliver AI-driven revenues and efficiencies that are 7.2x as high as those of other companies.

What are the nine factors of AI Fitness?

_{PwC’s AI performance study: Want ROI from AI? Go for growth, 2026}

AI advantage is not just about access to the technology. Increasingly, powerful AI tools are available to everyone. The difference is whether a business has the fitness to use them well.

Embedding AI fully is a key part. It means genuinely redesigning how work gets done, not treating AI as a bolt-on tool. That could mean reworking an end-to-end process such as customer service, forecasting and scenario modelling, inventory management, management reporting, or risk monitoring. The goal is to build AI into workflows, decision-making, escalation, and handoff points—not just use it to draft emails or summarise meetings in isolated parts of the business.

The businesses pulling ahead are not simply 'using AI'. They are changing the way work happens.

For leaders wondering where to begin, seven priorities consistently stand out in our work with private businesses globally.

• Build leadership fluency
  Leaders do not need to become technical specialists, but they do need enough practical understanding to judge where AI can create value, what risks need managing and where the organisation is not yet ready. AI is now a business leadership issue. It cannot be delegated entirely to technology teams.
• Focus on a few high-friction, high-value workflows
  You do not need to start everywhere at once. Start with a small number of workflows where AI can save meaningful time, improve quality or support better decisions—then redesign those workflows properly and measure the impact. That might include reporting, forecasting, customer service, knowledge management or internal decision support. Depth of adoption matters more than breadth of experimentation.
• Invest in your people, not just tools
  Technology on its own rarely changes performance. Value comes when your people know how to use AI confidently, responsibly and in ways that improve daily work. That requires upskilling, clear guardrails and making expectations explicit.
• Focus on the human in the loop, high-value workflows
  You do not need to start everywhere at once or automate full processes. Start with your people becoming power users of the frontier tools and let them focus on their workflows where AI can save meaningful time, improve quality or support better decisions. Keeping a human with knowledge and judgment in the loop for 20-30% of the process is the much quicker win than the much more ambitious lift of full automation. Human and tech is where the quick wins are.
• Treat AI as a source of capacity
  The commercial value of AI often comes from creating capacity across your business. Used well, it can help your teams handle more work, respond faster and improve consistency without increasing cost in the same proportion.
• Use AI to strengthen what sets your business apart
  Private businesses often compete through trust, expertise, responsiveness, and close customer relationships. AI should reinforce those strengths, not dilute them. The goal is not to make your business more generic or more automated for its own sake. It is to use AI in ways that help you deliver more consistently on what your customers already value most.
• Use AI to help you map where value is moving in and around your sector
  Value may be moving due to new customer behaviours, ecosystem plays, or climate pressures. Apply AI to size those opportunities, model risk scenarios, test assumptions, and identify new revenue streams.

With so much change already underway, it may be tempting to wait for greater certainty or for the technology to mature further before committing fully. But in our view, the greater risk now lies in waiting too long. As AI becomes more accessible, the gap is widening between businesses that are learning how to use it well and those still standing back.

Your competitive advantage will come from how quickly you learn, where you focus, how deliberately you redesign work and how well you support your people through change.

For private businesses thinking about future value, long-term relevance, and succession, the central question is how to turn AI into an advantage that lasts.