If you’ve scanned the tech headlines over the last couple of years, you could be forgiven for thinking that every marketing department in the country has handed the keys over to a chatbot. But what is the actual reality of AI adoption among UK businesses? Thanks to the Office for National Statistics (ONS) we now know that the AI takeover is fact moving at a much more measured pace than the hype suggests.
The stats don’t lie
According to the ONS’s most recent
Business Insights and Conditions Survey, published just this month, only
13.4% of UK businesses are currently using AI copywriting tools. (Spreadsheet fans,
click here and select BICS Wave 147)While the percentage is growing, it’s far from the universal adoption that some predicted. To put that into perspective, here is how the usage has trended over the last two years:
| Timeframe | % of Businesses Using
AI Writing Tools |
|---|
| Two years ago | 5.5% |
| Six months ago | 11.2% |
| Three months ago | 12.0% |
| Today | 13.4 |
The trajectory shows a steady climb, but it’s far from the exponential explosion that we at Write Arm expected. Even more telling is the gap between intention and action. Back in September 2025, nearly 8% of businesses claimed they intended to adopt AI tools within the quarter. But as we’ve seen in reality, the needle only moved by 1.4%.
Who is leading the charge?
While adoption is low across the board, certain sectors are proving to be earlier adopters than others. Currently, no single industry has topped a 35% adoption rate. The main sectors currently leaning into the technology are:
- Education: 34.5%
- Information and Communication: 32.9%
- Professional, Scientific, and Technical: 28.8%
- Real Estate: 20.5%
In the majority of other sectors, however, usage remains firmly in the single digits.
Why the hesitation?
The ONS data doesn’t specifically address why businesses are holding back on AI copywriting, but that ‘why’ isn’t hard to find. Beyond the well-documented risk of AI hallucination there is a significant resource barrier – at least to those who care about the quality of what they publish. That’s because, when it comes to written content, to truly unlock the benefits of AI businesses still have to invest in expertise, specifically:
- Prompting: Knowing how to guide the AI to match a specific brief and brand voice.
- Fact-Checking: Because LLMs won’t hesitate to dream up fictitious stats, quotes, people (and much else).
- Editing: Refining the output so it properly resonates with humans.
None of these things come at the click of a mouse. One day they might. But smart businesses will stick want experts to do the clicking.
