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Under the Spotlight: What SMEs Are Actually Asking AI
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Under the Spotlight: What SMEs Are Actually Asking AI

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TL;DR

  • European SMEs aren't chasing AI novelty — they're asking practical questions about cash flow, profitability, and growth
  • Small business owners return to Luca AI daily for short, focused check-ins (~4.5 minutes average)
  • Three themes come up consistently: cash flow visibility, profitability clarity, and growth decision-making
  • Banks have an opportunity to embed this kind of AI-driven decision support directly into tools SMEs already use
  • Luca AI is now available to SMEs across Europe through Mastercard's Business Bonus, with a 20% offer
Europe SME Community
Under the spotlight

What SMEs are actually asking AI?

AI Adoption Among European SMEs

Artificial intelligence is moving rapidly from experimentation to everyday business use — yet adoption among European SMEs remains uneven

20%
of EU enterprises as of 2025 with 10 or more employees use at least one AI technology, despite a sharp year on year increase1
17% vs 55%
of small enterprises use AI, compared with large companies, highlighting how cost, complexity, and lack of clear guidance continue to hold SMEs back1

When SMEs do adopt AI, their focus is highly practical. The most common uses across EU enterprises involve analysing written language, summarising information, and supporting day to day tasks, rather than advanced experimentation1

What SMEs Are Actually Asking AI — From the Front Lines

By Luca AI CEO, Eric Bidinger

Artificial intelligence has triggered no shortage of headlines. Will it replace jobs? Transform customer service? Reshape our relationship with work? Build entirely new industries?

Eric Bidinger, CEO of Luca AI

These are important societal questions, and the debate around them will continue for years.

But from our perspective as an AI provider working directly with SMEs, we see something very different.

Small and medium sized business leaders are not spending much time worrying about the philosophical implications of AI. They are focused on far more immediate questions: how to manage fulfilment ahead of peak demand, whether cash flow can support the next inventory purchase, why customer retention is softening, or whether a growth opportunity is genuinely worth pursuing.

That tells us something important.

For SMEs, AI’s greatest promise is not novelty. It is practical decision making clarity.

1.https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20251211-2

How SMEs Actually Talk to AI

One of the most striking shifts we see is how naturally business owners want to interact with AI. They do not want to write complex prompts or learn new workflows. They want to ask questions in plain language — just as they would to a trusted colleague or advisor:

Can I afford to scale this campaign?
Why does cash feel tighter despite stronger sales?
Which product lines are quietly eroding margin?

This behavior is not occasional. Across Luca’s user base, small business owners return to their AI advisor every day for short check-ins, averaging around 4.5 minutes, with engagement growing steadily.

These are focused conversations — quick moments to validate decisions, sense check performance, and understand how the business is tracking right now.

That pattern matters because modern SMEs already have no shortage of data. Payments sit in one system, marketing metrics in another, with accounting, inventory, forecasting, and customer retention spread across an increasingly fragmented software stack.

The challenge is not access to information. It is making sense of it quickly enough to act with confidence.

Across the businesses we support, three themes consistently emerge

Cash flow visibility

Business owners want to understand not just where the business stands today, but what is likely to happen next — whether working capital will tighten, whether it is the right moment to invest, or whether upcoming demand can be supported

Profitability clarity

Revenue growth alone can be misleading if margins are quietly deteriorating. Leaders want to know which products, campaigns, or customer behaviours genuinely create value — and which undermine it.

Growth decision making

SMEs are ambitious by nature, but growth carries risk. Founders increasingly use AI to pressure test expansion scenarios, evaluate marketing spend, and assess whether an opportunity truly deserves action.

Together, these daily interactions reinforce a broader pattern: SMEs are not asking AI abstract questions. They are using it as a lightweight, always available advisor to support real commercial decisions.

This has important implications for the wider ecosystem serving small businesses — particularly financial institutions.

The Expanding Role of Banks in SME Decision-Making

Historically, banks have helped SMEs manage money. Increasingly, they have an opportunity to help SMEs make smarter operational decisions as well.

Imagine a banking experience that does more than display balances and transactions — one that can proactively highlight a likely cash squeeze, flag weakening customer behavior, or surface a growth opportunity worth financing. AI becomes most powerful when embedded inside platforms businesses already trust and use every day.

Equally important is accessibility. The most effective AI experiences remove complexity rather than introduce it. Connecting a business should take minutes, not months — and value should be visible almost immediately.

The next generation of business tools will not simply explain what happened yesterday. They will help leaders decide what to do next. For SMEs, that distinction matters enormously.

Eric Bidinger, CEO of Luca AI
Eric Bidinger, Luca AI

Luca AI is now available to SMEs across Europe through Business Bonus

By accessing Luca AI via Business Bonus, small businesses can benefit from AI driven insights that support everyday decision making — from cash flow and profitability to growth planning — through short, focused interactions designed to fit naturally into daily workflows.

For financial institutions, this represents another step toward embedding intelligent, decision support tools directly into SME ecosystems — delivering value beyond transactions and strengthening long term relationships.

Check Business Bonus offer
20% off — Luca, your AI co-founder
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Eric Bidinger
Co-Founder, CEO
About Author

Eric Bidinger is an aerospace engineer and applied mathematician who spent 17 years in private equity in Asia, Europe, and North America. Eventually, he traded boardrooms for builder mode — returning to his roots in engineering to co-found startups in deeptech, B2B software, and the consumer space. Along the way, one truth became obvious: every founder needs a 10x sparring partner — a swiss army knife who thinks strategically, executes relentlessly, and believes in the vision enough to fund it. The only problem? That person almost never exists. So Eric set out to build Luca with the rest of the team, including Luca himself. In his spare time, Eric helped develop the world’s first family of hydrogen-electric aircraft.

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