AI and Scottish Business: What I told today’s panel (and the bits we ran out of time for)!

I was on a live panel this lunchtime from Business Gateway talking about AI and Scottish business.

And if you know me at all, you’ll know that before the Zoom call had even fully closed, I was already thinking about how to turn my prep notes into a blog post.

Waste not, want not. I’ve never met a good set of notes I didn’t want to squeeze a second use out of.

So here it is.

Business Gateway ran an hour long webinar today, “AI and digital advantage 2026: what Scottish businesses need to know”, hosted by Danny Gallagher, Business Gateway’s manager for the Highlands, alongside Colin Borland from the FSB, Scott Henderson from Crunchy Carrots, and Jill McAlpine, founder of Working with Me. My job on the panel was to bring the small business view, the stuff I hear every single week from the SME owners I train and mentor across Scotland. Armed with little more than a loose agenda and a general steer on some of the questions heading our way, the four of us still crammed in a lot in sixty minutes, and predictably, we didn’t get through everything live.

Which brings me to the bit I need to be upfront about. I’ve used AI to help turn my scribbled prep notes, typed up answers, and on-the-fly responses from earlier into this proper blog post. The structure, a bit of tidying up, some of the phrasing… that’s had a hand from AI. Every opinion below, though, every bit of advice, every stubborn view I’m about to defend, that’s entirely mine.

(I’ll come back to why I think that distinction matters more than most businesses currently admit. Stick with me.)

Right. Onto what I actually think.

From “what is it?” to “how do we do it well?”

If you’d asked me a year ago what the biggest AI trend for Scottish SMEs was, I’d have said awareness. Now it’s confidence.

We’ve hit a tipping point on AI adoption for Scottish business. Most small firms aren’t asking “what is AI” any more, they’re using it. That’s not niche behaviour any more. That’s the mainstream (Colin from the FSB touched on similar numbers during the panel today, and if you fancy the full detail, the FSB’s new Confidence Code report is worth a browse).

So the question has shifted. It’s not “is this worth investigating”, it’s “how do we make it work better for us”, “how do we use it safely”, “how do we get real value out of it rather than treating it as a glossy toy”.

Here’s my one wee tip for anyone feeling like they’re behind: don’t start with AI. Start with a business problem you’re trying to solve, or a task that’s eating your time, and only then go looking for whether AI can help. Backwards, I know. It works far better than chasing every shiny new tool.

The real gap isn’t technology, it’s leadership

Here’s an uncomfortable one. Most Scottish businesses I work with aren’t underprepared technologically. They’re underprepared organisationally.

Do you have clear objectives for why you’re using digital tools? Are your leaders and managers actually leading by example, or quietly using ChatGPT on the side while telling staff to be careful? Is there a policy, even a simple one, so staff know what’s allowed and what isn’t?

This is where “shadow AI” comes in. Staff using ChatGPT (or Claude, or whatever they’ve found) without guidance, without guardrails, without anyone in the business actually knowing. It’s not about stopping people. People will use tools that make their job easier, and honestly, good on them for trying. It’s about building some boundaries and support around it before it becomes a genuine data or reputational risk.

Yes, the risks are real: cyber security, ethics, regulation, all of it. But here’s the thing most people miss. These aren’t new risks. Poor data handling, weak security, inaccurate information, they were business risks long before AI turned up. AI’s just turned the volume up on all of them. Knowledge is power (cheesy but true), so knowing the risks gives you the power to work with them rather than be caught out by them.

You don’t need to keep up with everything

I hear this every single week at my workshops: another new tool, another new feature, and a real sense of being overwhelmed by it all. You finally get comfortable with one AI chat tool… and suddenly everyone’s talking about the next thing.

My advice? Don’t try to keep up. Don’t try to be an expert on all things AI. Pick one or two tools you know can genuinely help your business, and get good at using them. That’s it. There’s a new AI launch practically every day, and if you tried to follow all of them, you’d never get any actual work done.

Here’s the slightly contradictory bit I like to throw in at this point. If everyone has access to the same tools, maybe the biggest competitive advantage isn’t using AI more. Maybe it’s knowing when not to use it, and doubling down on the very human qualities AI still can’t replicate.

On budget, for what it’s worth: SMEs don’t need corporate scale AI spend. Most of the useful tools cost a manageable monthly fee (some are free, though I’d be cautious there, usually you’re paying with your data instead of cash). This isn’t really about spending money. It’s about thinking differently, using AI as a thinking partner, a critical adviser, a way to offload the tasks you don’t actually want to do so you can spend more time on the human stuff that matters.

The Scottish businesses that actually inspire me

I get asked about big, headline grabbing AI success stories a lot. And sure, there are brilliant ones out there. NHS Grampian’s work using Gemini in breast cancer screening. Edinburgh based Wordsmith building AI tools for the legal sector. Russell Transport using AI to optimise warehousing and logistics. All genuinely impressive, all worth celebrating.

But honestly? None of those are what inspires me most.

What inspires me is the small scale food producer who can spend more time perfecting flavours because AI is quietly handling the social media burden. It’s the local accountant having more face to face client meetings than ever, because AI’s doing the number crunching in the background. It’s the architect using AI generated imagery to tell a better story about why their homes are different.

It’s not the technology that’s inspiring. It’s the mindset. Businesses that show up saying “we’re not very technical, AI probably isn’t for us”, and six months later they’re saving hours a week and building genuine confidence. Those stories are achievable for pretty much every business reading this, which is exactly why they matter more than the flashy case studies.

The trust gap nobody’s really talking about

Right, here’s where I loop back to that confession at the start.

There’s a trust problem with AI right now, and it’s not just my opinion, it came up more than once on today’s panel. People don’t fully buy into it yet, whatever the productivity headlines say (the ONS keep a running dataset on public attitudes to AI if you want to see just how sceptical people still are). That gap matters more than most businesses are currently treating it.

Which is exactly why businesses need to do more than just adopt AI quietly in the background. We need to demonstrate we’re using it responsibly, in ways that genuinely improve outcomes for customers, not just save us time behind the scenes.

I’m seeing more small businesses quietly deciding not to use AI for their public facing content. Not because it isn’t useful, but because they know not everyone will thank them for it. AI slop is a real thing, and people are, rightly in my view, pushing back against it in favour of human creativity and authenticity.

So, back to my earlier confession. AI helped me structure this post from a stack of scrappy notes I’d typed up before the panel. I’m telling you that openly rather than quietly hoping nobody asks. Because trust is thin on the ground right now, and the businesses that get ahead won’t be the ones using AI the most. They’ll be the ones being straightest about how, and why, they’re using it.

What I’d actually do in the next six months

If you want the practical version, here’s what I’d genuinely prioritise:

• Build confidence, not just skills. Get your team learning together. A regular, informal “show and tell” lunch session where people share what they’ve tried works wonders, and it’s a lot less intimidating than a formal training day (not that you shouldn’t attend formal training days, and some companies, ahem, deliver them in a fun non-intimdating way! ;).
• Find your time vampires. The boring, repetitive tasks that suck the life out of your week are usually the best early candidates for AI experiments. Just keep a human in the loop, and of course be careful with private or personal data etc.
• Strengthen your digital presence. AI is changing how customers find you and research decisions. Keep your website current, keep building genuine reviews, and create content people actually trust (I wrote a longer piece on exactly this for Business Gateway recently, if you want to go deeper: AI search optimisation, a practical guide for small business owners).

None of that requires a big budget or a technical team. It just requires a willingness to try.

Where does that leave government’s role?

Briefly, because I happily left the detail to others on the panel who know that world better than I do. But for me, government shouldn’t just encourage AI adoption. It should make it safer, easier, and more confident to adopt, through practical impartial advice (not hype), investment in skills, and support for the SMEs that make up the backbone of the Scottish economy.

If there’s one line I keep coming back to, it’s this: AI should augment people, not replace them. Technology moves fast. Human skills last. That’s been true for every wave of change I’ve seen in nearly 30 years of doing this, and I don’t see AI being any different.

If today’s panel got you thinking and you want to go further, that’s genuinely what we do at NSDesign, day in, day out. Have a look at our upcoming AI training, or just get in touch and we’ll have a chat about where to start.