AI in 2027: what's changing and what it means for getting customers

· 5 min read · Good Find team

AI has gone from a novelty to something most businesses touch every week. It drafts the email, summarises the meeting, tidies the spreadsheet. More and more, it's also where your next customer goes to ask who they should hire.

That last part is the one we think most small businesses and consultants are underestimating. So here's our honest read on where AI actually stands at the end of 2026, where it's realistically heading in 2027, and what that means for how customers find you. We've kept the hype out and the sources in.

Where AI actually is right now

AI is everywhere. The payoff isn't, yet.

In big business, using AI is now close to universal. McKinsey's State of AI survey, published in August 2026, found nearly nine in ten organisations regularly use it in at least one part of the business. But only 37% can point to any impact on profit, and only about 6% are getting significant value. Plenty of activity, much less return.

The next wave is already here too: AI agents, tools that don't just answer a question but carry out a task from start to finish. Among large organisations, 40% are now scaling agents, up from 27% a year ago. Among smaller ones, that figure has sat still at 22%.

In Australia, the picture depends on who you ask:

  • The ABS found 12% of employing businesses used AI in 2024–25, up from 1% a few years earlier.
  • auDA's Digital Lives of Australians 2026 found 72% of small businesses have used AI, up from 64% in 2025.

Those numbers aren't really in conflict. One measures AI built into how a business runs. The other counts anyone who's tried it. The gap between the two is the real story: most businesses have had a go, but few have made it part of how they work.

That gap between trying AI and getting value from it is where 2027 will be decided.

What 2027 is likely to look like

Nobody knows exactly, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something. But four shifts are already well under way.

1. AI moves from answering to doing. Agents will handle more of the multi-step work: comparing options, booking, chasing, following up. Gartner predicts that by 2028, a third of business software will include agents, up from under 1% in 2024. It also expects at least 15% of everyday work decisions to be made by AI on its own.

2. A shake-out. The same Gartner research predicts more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be scrapped by the end of 2027, mostly because of rising costs, unclear value or poor risk controls. It reckons only about 130 of the thousands of vendors selling "AI agents" offer the real thing. Expect fewer, better tools, and a lot of quietly cancelled subscriptions.

3. Search keeps turning into answers. When Google shows an AI summary, people click through far less. Pew Research tracked real searches and found people clicked a result 8% of the time when there was an AI summary, against 15% when there wasn't. They clicked a link inside the summary just 1% of the time. More questions will be answered without anyone visiting a website.

4. Cost and trust become the real constraints. About one in five businesses in McKinsey's survey say AI running costs are already limiting how much they use it. As AI writes more of what we read, people will get better at spotting generic content and quicker to ignore it.

What we don't expect to change: people still buy from people and businesses they trust. AI changes how they find you and check you out. It doesn't replace the reason they choose you.

What it means for how customers find you

This is where it gets practical for small businesses and consultants.

The shortlist is made before they reach you. Someone asks an AI tool, "Who's a good HR consultant for a 30-person business in Brisbane?" They get a handful of names back. If you're not one of them, you weren't in the race, and you'll never know it happened.

AI repeats what's already out there about you. These tools draw on your website, your Google Business Profile, reviews, directory listings and anything else written about you. If that information is vague, out of date or inconsistent, you're harder to recommend. Clear and specific beats clever.

Fewer clicks means each visit counts for more. The people who do land on your site have usually done their homework already. They're further along and closer to deciding. If your page doesn't quickly answer who you help, what you do and what it costs, they'll move on to the next name on the list.

Speed wins. When it's easy to contact three businesses in a minute, the first one to reply properly has a real head start. A slow follow-up was always costly. It's about to get more so.

Inboxes get noisier. AI makes it cheap to send generic messages at scale, so everyone's inbox is filling with polished, empty outreach. That makes a short, genuinely relevant message from a real person stand out more, not less.

What to do about it now

None of this needs a big budget. Most of it is good marketing done properly, with AI making the gaps easier to see.

  1. Make yourself easy to describe. Say plainly who you help, what you do, where you work and roughly what it costs. Use the same wording on your website, your Google Business Profile and your directory listings.
  2. Fill in the basics everywhere. A complete, accurate Google Business Profile and a few well-kept directory listings do more for AI visibility than most people realise.
  3. Answer the questions customers actually ask. Put your pricing, process and FAQs on your site in everyday language. If a customer would ask it on a call, an AI tool will be asked it too.
  4. Collect real reviews. Ask happy clients to mention specifics: what you did, how long it took, what changed. Detail is what makes a review useful, to people and to AI.
  5. Fix your follow-up. Reply to every enquiry the same day, and follow up at least once if you hear nothing. It's the cheapest win on this list.
  6. Use AI behind the scenes, not in your voice. Let it handle drafts, admin and research. Keep a human on anything that goes out under your name.
  7. Pick one problem, not ten tools. Choose the thing costing you the most work or the most leads, try one tool against it, and measure the result before adding anything else.

The bottom line

2027 won't reward the businesses with the most AI. It'll reward the ones that are easiest to find, easiest to understand and quickest to respond. The tools will keep changing. Those three things won't.

If you'd like help getting found on Google and in AI tools, or building a steady flow of enquiries that doesn't depend on luck, that's exactly what we do. Have a chat with us.

Sources

Want to be easier to find, in Google and in AI?

We help consultants and small businesses get found and get a steady flow of the right enquiries.

Have a chat

Related: Lead generation services · Get found on Google & AI

Get more customers