A New Global Study of 1,600 SMB Leaders Reveals Where AI Ambition Is Outpacing Execution—and How TD SYNNEX Is Helping Partners Turn Readiness into Results
Most small and midsize businesses (SMBs) have stopped debating whether AI matters. The harder question to answer now is how to get it to do real work. A new global study from SAS and IDC, AI for SMBs: Closing the Readiness-Reality Gap, surveyed 1,600 SMB leaders across 28 countries and lands on a pattern that won’t surprise anyone who has sat through a partner roadmap session in the last 18 months: ambition is high, maturity is lagging and the distance between the two is widening for many companies.
TD SYNNEX was part of that conversation alongside SAS, IDC and a global set of channel and customer contributors sharing what we’ve been hearing from partners about what really moves an SMB from a handful of AI experiments to something that runs the business.
The Reality Check
The headline numbers are the ones the channel will recognize:
- Nearly 70% of SMBs are still in the early stages of AI maturity.
- 37% are running isolated, disconnected experiments.
- 33% have started to put some structure around it.
- Just nine percent have fully embedded AI into how they make decisions and run operations, and only 22% are aligning people, priorities and execution.
The report frames maturity across four areas: Planning, Building, Enabling and Executing. SMBs are inching forward in all four, but slowly. The barriers cited most often are familiar ones: fragmented data, isolated initiatives, thin AI skills, weak governance and difficulty tying any of it back to ROI.
Most SMBs have started. Few have scaled. The gap between intent and execution is where partners, distributors and the wider ecosystem have real work to do.
A TD SYNNEX Perspective
Mark Martin, Global Vice President, Data & AI and Vendor Transformation at TD SYNNEX, contributed commentary to the report. For Martin, the findings reflect patterns he’s seen play out across the channel for years. With more than 35 years in IT distribution and a career spent helping partners adapt to successive waves of transformation, he now leads TD SYNNEX’s global Data & AI business, working directly with vendors and partners to turn emerging technologies into scalable, repeatable practices:
“AI is moving rapidly from experimentation to operational reality, and AI-enabled operations are quickly becoming the new standard for SMBs. The organizations seeing real value are those modernizing their environments with intelligent, adaptive systems—using AI to automate routine work, strengthen resilience and turn ambition into valuable business outcomes.”
What the SAS-IDC research confirms, in Martin’s view, is something his team has been raising in partner conversations for the last several quarters: the question is no longer whether SMBs want AI, but what stands in the way of using it at meaningful scale?
“The gap between aspiration and execution is the part that stands out to me,” Martin says. “It isn’t that partners or their customers lack interest. They lack a repeatable path. Nine percent of SMBs running AI as part of how the business actually operates tells you how much room is still on the table for the channel, and it’s why Destination AI™ is structured the way it is. We wanted partners to have an honest read on where they are, a clear view of what’s missing, and a way to connect to the right vendors without having to assemble all of that themselves.”
He keeps coming back to a shorter list of issues that, in his experience, separate the partners scaling AI from the ones cycling through pilots: data readiness, governance, AI skills on the team and a tight link between a use case and the business outcome it’s supposed to move.
“You can’t really shortcut any of them,” he says. “The partners doing the work on those fundamentals are the ones getting things into production. The ones skipping them tend to stay in pilot mode longer than they expected.”
Distribution’s role, he argues, is to take some of that weight off partners.
“Our job is to make this easier to navigate. That means curating the vendor mix so partners aren’t chasing every new AI startup, providing the readiness assessments and enablement that get teams up to speed faster and giving partners the operating muscle to bring AI into customer environments without rebuilding their practice every time. Studies like this one are useful because they validate what we’re hearing in the field and help us prioritize where to invest next.”
How TD SYNNEX Is Helping Close the Gap
The priorities outlined in the SAS-IDC report already align closely with the capabilities TD SYNNEX has been building through Destination AI™, its global enablement framework for accelerating partner success in AI:
- AI Readiness Profiling: Identifies partners as Aware, Ready or Expert so that enablement and go-to-market support match partner expertise.
- The Destination AI™ Solution Grid: A visual tool that ties AI opportunities to a partner’s current capabilities and strategic priorities across both AI-native and AI-enabled solutions.
- AI Game Plan: A strategic enablement experience that runs repeatable, outcome-oriented AI workshops to help customers move past curiosity into real results. It gives TD SYNNEX partners a repeatable way to guide meaningful AI discussions, gather business-driven input and identify the opportunities worth advancing.
- Vendor Ecosystem Curation: Bringing together leading AI software, infrastructure and services vendors, including long-standing analytics and AI players like SAS, under one go-to-market motion partners can easily navigate.
The common thread across the SAS-IDC research and Destination AI™ is helping partners give SMB customers a more repeatable path to operationalize AI in ways that are measurable, manageable and built to scale.
Why This Matters for the Channel
For TD SYNNEX partners, the SAS-IDC research lands less as a market snapshot and more as a working list. SMB customers are ready to move. They’re looking to the partners they already trust to lead them through it. The opportunity sitting in front of the channel isn’t about selling more AI tools. It’s about delivering outcomes the business can point to: faster decisions, less manual work, fewer brittle processes and a return that can be measured against the investment.
With SAS, TD SYNNEX partners can pair trusted analytics with AI to work on the problems SMBs already have across industries and maturity levels. Through Destination AI™, they get the enablement, the ecosystem and the go-to-market structure to do that more than once.
Learn More and Go Deeper
Explore the full report and benchmark your organization against 1,600 global SMB leaders:
- Read the Report: AI for SMBs: Closing the Readiness-Reality Gap.
- Take the Assessment: Use IDC’s AI Readiness Calculator to see where your organization stands and what to address first.
- Explore Destination AI™: Learn how TD SYNNEX helps partners move from AI interest to scaled execution.
The readiness-reality gap is real, but it can be closed. We are working with the partner ecosystem every day to help make that happen.
