Why enterprises are leaning in to AI — and growing businesses aren't

There's a number from a McKinsey study I haven't been able to shake: 42% versus 83%. That's the AI adoption rate for growing businesses versus enterprises — a 41-point gap. And the standard explanation for it is completely wrong.

These aren't "small" businesses. They're growing companies with real revenues, loyal customers, and big ambitions. The kind with a marketing budget, a clear conviction that marketing matters, and a genuine desire to get better at it.

The standard narrative says they need more awareness, simpler tools, and better education. That narrative misses the real root cause entirely, and in doing so, has created one of the biggest overlooked opportunities in AI.

Why enterprises are leaning in — and growing businesses aren't

Here's what didn't cause enterprise AI adoption: curiosity. Technical capability. A grassroots push from employees who wanted better tools. Here's what did: a mandate.

C-suite executives set adoption targets. Department heads got budget and accountability to hit them. IT teams built the infrastructure to roll everything out. When an enterprise deploys an AI product, there's an entire organizational machine pushing it forward from the top down.

Growing businesses have none of that. Marketing decisions get made by the owner, or a small team wearing five hats. There's no implementation budget, no one whose job it is to figure out the new tool, and no mandate driving anything.

Most AI products were also built for someone with time and expertise the growing business owner doesn't have, and doesn't want to develop. They require configuration, prompting know-how, and ongoing management just to produce consistent output. The busy owner trying to run their business doesn't have that time. They know this before they even sign up.

The gap isn't attitudinal. It's structural.

What actually closes the implementation gap

The pitch every AI startup makes to this market goes like this: we just need a simpler tool. Better onboarding, smarter defaults, faster time to value. It's a reasonable thesis. For most of this market, it's the wrong one.

But any product that requires the customer to run it still requires the customer to run it. You can make onboarding friendlier, add more templates, cut setup time in half. But if the business owner has to show up every week and manage the thing, you're still asking for something they don't have: consistent time and attention.

The model that works is one where the customer's only job is to approve, not to do.

That's what we built at Blaze. We call it Done For You — a dedicated human marketing strategist, backed by AI, who handles your strategy, content, and distribution end to end. It's not a tool you log into or a dashboard you manage. It's a service that runs your marketing every week, without you having to think about it.

Here's how it works: you get onboarded, share what makes your business different, and approve a content plan. From there, Blaze takes over completely. Content goes out across social, blog, video, email, and ads on a consistent schedule. Campaigns get built and optimized. Performance data feeds back into the following month's strategy, so the marketing gets smarter over time — on its own.

The people running it are what we call Forward Deployed Marketers: veteran strategists who would normally be billing $10,000 a month to enterprise clients at an agency. Skyler, one of our first FDMs, spent 12 years running marketing operations and agency partnerships at scale. At Blaze, because AI handles the execution layer, his time goes entirely toward what actually moves the needle: understanding each business, shaping the strategy, and making sure every piece of content that goes out is something the owner is proud of.

Done For You isn't just the right product — it's a great business model

For thirty years, agencies charged $10,000 a month and nobody seriously questioned it, because there was no other way to get the work done. That assumption just broke. But not in the way most people expect.

AI changes the math. When AI generates the content, builds the campaign, and tracks performance, the strategist isn't doing production work anymore. They're doing what a great marketer actually does: thinking about the business, shaping strategy, making judgment calls on quality. The execution layer is handled. The human layer focuses entirely on outcomes.

That's why Done For You starts at $999 a month — about a tenth of what an agency charges for comparable scope — and still runs at 60%+ gross margins. The margins are possible because we've completely changed what the human is doing, not because we've cut corners on it.

Done For You looks like an agency from the outside. The business model underneath is completely different.

The counterintuitive truth about growing businesses

Most B2B software companies are chasing enterprise. Longer contracts, bigger ACVs, better logos for the website. Here's what they're missing.

With growing businesses, there's no procurement process, no legal review, no nine-month sales cycle with a committee that reshuffles twice before you close. The buyer is the operator. When they're convinced, they move. One conversation. One decision. One credit card.

Buying cycles that take enterprises a year take growing businesses three weeks.

The ROI math is equally immediate. Take a flooring company doing $2M a year. Their average job is worth $8,000. One new customer, one homeowner who found them on Instagram instead of a competitor, covers three months of Blaze. For most growing businesses, one new customer pays for the whole thing.

We see this in how customers talk about the product. The owners who stay aren't obsessing over engagement metrics. They're the ones who stopped thinking about marketing entirely, because someone else is handling it consistently every week without being asked. That's the outcome they were actually buying. Not content or strategy, but time back and the confidence that it's getting done.

They know marketing matters, they have real budget, and they're stretched thin enough to pay well for someone, or something, to just handle it. That's a massive, underserved segment. Until now, almost nothing has been built specifically for them.

The gap closes through delivery, not technology

Every professional services category follows the same arc when AI matures. Legal research. Clinical documentation. Insurance claims. In each case, the interface got better — and nobody cared. The winner was whoever figured out how to deliver the outcome.

Marketing is next. Businesses spend $284 billion a year on marketing agencies because marketing is genuinely hard, important, and time-consuming. AI doesn't change any of those three things. What it changes is who has to do the work, and what it costs to get it done well.

Harvey didn't win in legal by making research software easier to use. They won by making it possible to get the work done without hiring a $500-an-hour associate. The equivalent in marketing isn't a smarter dashboard. It's a model where the growing business owner never has to touch the tool at all.

That 41-point gap will close. The only question is which model closes it.

The companies that figure out delivery, not just technology, are the ones that will own this market.