only 23% of UK SMEs in our dataset have a written AI strategy
These are launch figures, not survey results. Nobody has completed the nura Snapshot yet, so every number below is modelled from published UK SME research and from 18 anonymised interviews we ran before launch. It scores four foundations of AI readiness — people, documents, data, strategy — and each section switches to real answers as the cohort grows.
how does your business compare?where UK SMEs actually score
Mean scores out of 100 across the cohort. Higher is more ready. Strategy is consistently the lowest pillar — and the cheapest one to fix.
Team attitude, leadership literacy, learning capacity
SOPs, playbooks, knowledge captured outside heads
Structure, quality, accessibility of business data
Goals, priorities, budget, decision authority
curious where your business sits?
take the 5-minute Snapshotwhere the cohort sits
Distribution of overall AI readiness across all four pillars. Most UK SMEs are emerging, not early — they have pockets of progress but no plan to connect them.
Curious but not yet experimenting
Pockets of use, no joined-up plan
Strategy in place, scaling adoption
AI-native habits across the team
the work that quietly eats the week
Themed and frequency-ordered. Until the cohort lands these are modelled from published research on where UK SME admin time goes — not from free-text Snapshot answers.
- 01Email triage and inbox management31%
- 02Quote and proposal preparation22%
- 03Internal reporting and weekly numbers18%
- 04Hiring and onboarding paperwork15%
- 05Compliance and audit prep14%
where your sector stands
Mean overall AI readiness by sector. The counts beside each row are modelled, not respondent totals. Once the cohort lands we publish a sector mean only when it has at least five real respondents.
how we built this
Each respondent completes the nura Snapshot — twelve scored questions across the four foundations, plus sector, region, and team-size metadata. Pillar scores are normalised to 0-100 and aggregated only when the cohort cell has at least five respondents.
Names, business names, contact details and free-text answers stay private. Only the four pillar scores plus cohort labels enter the benchmark, and only with explicit opt-in. Read the trust statement for the full data position.
Note: the figures above include research-based seed data drawn from UK SME productivity research (Be the Business 2024, ONS BICS, McKinsey UK SME 2024) plus 18 anonymised pre-launch consultancy interviews. As the live cohort grows, seed values are replaced with respondent data section-by-section.
add your business to the benchmark
Five minutes. Four pillar scores. A 12-week plan in your inbox. You can opt in or out of the public benchmark — entirely your call.
take the Snapshot