AI Is Already Shopping For Your Customers: What UK Small Businesses Need to Do Before Christmas
AI is already shopping for your customers If you sell anything, online or on the high street, you need to see this before Christmas trading starts. AI assistants have stopped being a novelty for shoppers and started being a habit. New research from payments company Adyen puts UK use of AI shopping assistants at 28%, […]
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Companies House ID Verification Is Live. So Are the Scammers Copying It.
Every director of a UK company now has a legal deadline attached to their own identity, and most have never heard of it. Companies House began phasing in mandatory identity verification on 18 November 2025, and by the time most existing directors notice, the scammers already have. We have spent the last fortnight helping clients […]
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A Third of UK Firms Already Use ‘Bossware’. The Government Just Opened a Consultation on It.
If you run a small business, you need to see this: the government has opened a consultation on the AI tools that watch your staff, and a third of UK organisations are already using something that would fall inside it. We spend most of our time in this newsletter talking about AI that helps a […]
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Google Just Made Its Windows AI Free. Microsoft Still Wants £30 a Month for Copilot.
Google just made its Windows AI free. Microsoft still wants £30 a month for Copilot. If you run a small business and you’re paying for Microsoft 365 Copilot, you need to see this. On 10 September 2026, Google released a native Gemini app for Windows, five months after it launched on macOS only. It’s free […]
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43% of UK Businesses Were Breached This Year. Almost None Have an AI Policy For It.
43% of UK businesses were breached or attacked in the last twelve months. That is roughly 612,000 organisations, according to the government’s own Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2025/2026, run by Ipsos for the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology and the Home Office. We read that figure alongside a second one from the same survey […]
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38 UK Small Businesses Close Every Day Over Late Payments. Here’s the AI Fix.
If you run a small business, you need to see this: 38 UK businesses close every single day because of late payments. Not because the work was bad. Not because the customers weren’t there. Because the money owed to them never arrived on time. We built this piece because the number is bigger than most […]
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HMRC’s AI Just Recovered £10 Billion. Small Business Is 62% of Why
If you run a small business, HMRC is already using AI to read your books, and it is getting better at it fast. The tax authority says artificial intelligence and advanced analytics helped protect and recover £10 billion in tax during the 2025 to 2026 financial year. It has appointed its first Chief AI Officer. […]
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UK Small Business AI Use Just Doubled. Confidence Didn’t Follow.
Adoption just went through the roof Something shifted this year. Simply Business’s 2026 SME Insights Report, a survey of 1,842 UK small businesses, found that 47% of small firms now use AI, more than double the 22% recorded a year earlier. Another 13% say they plan to start within the next six to twelve months, […]
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UK Small Business Confidence Just Hit a Record Low. Here’s the One Lever Still Working.
UK small business confidence has just hit its lowest point since records began. That is not a headline we enjoy writing, but it is the one worth sitting with this week, because the businesses that are quietly doing better than the average are not the ones waiting for the economy to turn. They are the […]
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AI Just Changed the Game for Small Business: What You Can Actually Hand Over Now
Most small businesses now use AI. Almost none of them have let it actually do anything. That is the gap sitting underneath a lot of the AI conversation this year. Goldman Sachs’ 10,000 Small Businesses survey found that 76% of small firms now report using AI in some form, yet only 14% say it is […]
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