Sebrae: 44% of small businesses already use AI

In June 2025, Sebrae (Brazil's support service for micro and small businesses) reported that 44% of Brazilian small businesses already use some artificial intelligence tool. Use is higher among small companies (65%) than among individual microentrepreneurs, the MEIs (35%), and the main destination is marketing. In January 2026, another survey, by Sebrae with FGV Ibre and Google, showed the other side: almost everyone knows generative AI, but few use it frequently.

What happened

The 2025 survey, from the series Transformação Digital nos Pequenos Negócios (Digital Transformation in Small Businesses), was presented by Sebrae and reported by CNN Brasil. Among the figures:

• 44% of small business owners use some AI solution;
• 65% in small companies and 35% among MEIs;
• 51% of those who use AI have already tried generative tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and DeepSeek.

Sebrae's president, Décio Lima, summed it up this way, according to CNN: "Artificial intelligence is a concept there is no turning back from."

On January 22, 2026, Agência Sebrae published the results of a survey carried out with FGV Ibre and Google, with around 5,000 companies interviewed in September 2025. It details how AI is used:

• marketing and promotion are the main use: 59% among micro and small companies and 74% among MEIs;
• 96% of micro and small companies and 87% of MEIs know generative AI platforms;
• but only 15% of micro and small companies and 18% of MEIs use them frequently;
• among MEIs, 23% say they do not know how to apply AI to their own business.

Why it matters

The numbers tell a story in two parts. The first is good: AI has reached Brazilian small businesses, and it arrived through the cell phone. The second is the challenge: knowing is not using, and using it to write a post is not using it to run the business.

Marketing is the natural entry point, because results show up quickly. But the bigger gains tend to lie where small business owners suffer most and ask for help least: inventory control, pricing, cash flow, customer service, collections. Sebrae researcher Marco Aurélio Bedê, quoted in the survey's release, points to digital literacy as an obstacle, even with 98% of entrepreneurs connected.

In Bairo's view

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez knows from the inside what it is like to run a business without structure. He says he opened a salon, created a course, manufactured cosmetics and worked with events before arriving at technology, and that he lost everything more than once. In his reading, small business owners do not need one more tool: they need an extension of themselves, something that does the heavy lifting while they take care of the customer.

That is why he bets on niche AIs. For Bairo, the Sebrae survey shows that generic AI has already arrived, and that what is missing is AI that understands each person's business: the butcher shop, the repair garage, the market stall. CLAIN, the agent orchestrator he founded, is designed for this: small specialists, each on one concrete pain point, with the decision always going back to the business owner. The goal of 142 niche AIs in 142 days is a public goal, announced on October 1, 2026.

He also recalls that he started without knowing how to code. For him, the 23% of MEIs who do not know how to apply AI are not behind: they are at the beginning, as he once was.

Where this meets the ecosystem

• CEASA Bank, a financial platform for agribusiness that operates on the infrastructure of an authorized institution, proposes agents and dashboards for traders at the wholesale food markets, who are, for the most part, small businesses.
• Investment House brings business owners together for immersion at A Mesa. It is institutional content, and the subject there is management and exchange, not an offering.
• The practical guides on AI for small businesses and on how to use AI to start a business were written for those taking their first step.

Sources

• CNN Brasil, 06/17/2025: 44% dos pequenos negócios usam inteligência artificial, diz Sebrae (44% of small businesses use artificial intelligence, says Sebrae)
• Agência Sebrae, 01/22/2026: Pequenos negócios abraçam a inteligência artificial para otimizar o tempo e inovar (Small businesses embrace artificial intelligence to save time and innovate)
• DataSebrae: Transformação Digital nos Pequenos Negócios (Digital Transformation in Small Businesses)

Read also

• AI for small businesses: where to use it first
• AI is an extension of you
• CLAIN: what it is and why it matters
• 1420mhz: what it is and why it matters
• AI costs fell more than 280-fold: what the AI Index says