only 23% of UK SMEs in our dataset have a written AI strategy
The benchmark below is built from the 142 UK SMEs who completed the nura Snapshot. It scores four foundations of AI readiness — people, documents, data, strategy — and refreshes monthly. Free to read, free to quote, free to add yourself to.
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
Free-text answers from the Snapshot, themed and frequency-ordered. The top three together account for more than 70% of the admin burden UK SMEs report.
- 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 across cohort sectors. We only publish a sector mean once it has at least five respondents — sectors below the threshold sit out until they hit it.
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