The OECD survey covers ten countries and is not representative of all SMEs. India is not in this sample. Recommendations below are Crestlane’s analysis.
What the survey can tell us
The OECD’s 2025 D4SME report studies digitalisation among small and medium-sized businesses in ten countries. In its sample, 39% of businesses reported using AI in core activities or products, compared with 26% in 2024. Generative AI use was reported by 26%, up from 18%.
The survey was distributed through digital platform partners. Its sample is not representative of the whole SME population, and it does not include India. The figures are a signal from the businesses surveyed, not a forecast for a Gurgaon business or a market-size estimate.
Start with the information you already use
A new tool cannot decide which of three customer spreadsheets is authoritative. Before adding automation, identify where the current customer record lives, who can change it and how the team recognises a duplicate. Do the same for product information, pricing and operating documents.
This does not require a large transformation programme. A first pass can be a short map: system, owner, information held, update frequency and the downstream work that depends on it. Missing owners and duplicated records become visible quickly.
Follow a task across the business
Trace one real task from start to finish. An enquiry may move from a website to an inbox, then to a spreadsheet and finally to a salesperson’s phone. The useful questions are where context is lost, where someone retypes a field, and how the business knows that a follow-up happened.
Improve the handoff before introducing more channels. A single shared queue with a clear owner can be more useful than another dashboard. When the team trusts that queue, routing rules and AI classification become easier to evaluate.
Four readiness checks
Ownership: every important system and process has someone responsible for keeping it usable. Access: people can do their jobs without sharing a single password. Information: the team knows which record is current. Recovery: someone knows what to do when an integration stops running.
Mark each area as established, partial or missing, and add one concrete example. The purpose is to make the next action visible. A missing recovery process, for example, becomes an alert destination, a retry procedure and an escalation contact.
Choose the first investment carefully
Our suggested starting point is a process that already matters to the business, has a willing owner and has enough reliable information to support a pilot. Set a review date before buying the next tool. Use that review to decide whether to extend the workflow, improve its foundations or stop the experiment.