AI 2040: Plan A

What is "AI 2040: Plan A" and why is it in the news?

AI 2040: Plan A is a 90 page scenario from the AI Futures Project, the team behind the earlier AI 2027 forecast. It imagines the US and China deliberately agreeing to delay building superintelligent AI until 2040 instead of racing to build it by 2030.

The mechanism is a US China chip tracking accord. The scenario notes that roughly 98.5% of AI chips worldwide pass through a handful of design and manufacturing firms, which is why hardware, not software, is treated as the main lever governments could use to slow things down.

For a small business owner, this is not a story about the next ten years. It is a signal about the next twelve months: even the people building frontier AI now expect it to become slower, more regulated and more geopolitically managed, not faster and freer.

Does this actually matter for a small business in the UK?

Not directly, and that is the point worth making clearly: no chip treaty is going to change how many bookings your salon takes next week. What it does confirm is that AI's growth curve is being actively debated at government level, which should make you treat AI as infrastructure to adopt steadily, not a bubble to either chase or ignore.

Meanwhile the gap between businesses using AI and those not using it is widening faster than any treaty timeline. GOV.UK's Business Data Survey 2026 found 41% of UK businesses using digitised data now use AI technologies, but only 40 to 41% of sole traders and micro businesses do, against 51% of small businesses and 58% of medium ones.

Separately, the British Chambers of Commerce and Atos reported UK SME AI adoption climbing to 54% in 2026, roughly double the prior year in some readings. Whatever the exact number, the direction is clear: the businesses around you are adopting faster than you are, regardless of what happens in Washington or Beijing in 2040.

What are UK small businesses actually using AI for right now?

Mostly writing, not decision making. Among UK small businesses already using AI, 71% use it for writing and content generation, 38% for customer service or chatbots, 29% for scheduling and admin automation, and 27% for image generation.

That ordering tells you something useful: the highest adoption is in the lowest stakes area (content) and the lowest adoption is in the areas that actually save money and time (scheduling, follow ups, customer service). If you want AI to affect your bottom line rather than just your blog, start with admin automation, not copywriting.

Why haven't more small businesses adopted AI yet?

The biggest barrier is not cost, it is confidence. 44% of UK small business owners say not knowing how to use AI tools effectively is their main barrier, ahead of cost at 31% and quality concerns at 19%.

That gap between adoption and payoff is real too. 75% of AI using UK businesses report improved productivity, but 77% say they have not yet seen a revenue change. In our experience that mismatch usually comes from applying AI to tasks that were never the bottleneck, like writing captions, while ignoring the ones that actually cost money, like missed calls and stale customer data.

What should I actually do about this in the next 30 days?

Fix the two things AI already reads about you before you touch any AI tool. 26% of UK small and medium businesses have no Google Business Profile at all, and only 41% have one that is fully claimed and complete, even as Google's AI Overviews and Gemini pull local search answers directly from that data.

Concretely:

• Claim and fully complete your Google Business Profile: opening hours, services, photos, and a weekly post. This is the same fix that took a Leeds salon from zero online presence to over 40 monthly calls from Google Maps within three weeks.
• Automate one follow up sequence you currently do manually or not at all, missed call texts, booking confirmations, or review requests. A plumber we worked with dropped Yell (£280 a month for 3 leads) for a Google Business Profile plus a small £120 a month ads campaign, and now gets 18 to 22 enquiries a month.
• Audit what you're renting versus owning: booking platforms, link pages, review widgets. A nail salon paying Fresha roughly £1,800 a month in commission moved to its own booking system at £35 a month, saving around £21,000 a year.

Braynex Services' view: what does "Plan A" mean for how you should build?

Our opinion is that the AI 2040 scenario, whether or not it plays out exactly as written, confirms something we already tell every client: build for AI to find you and recommend you, not just for humans to search for you. Being recommended by ChatGPT, Gemini and Google AI Overviews is becoming the new local SEO, and it runs on the same structured data (business profiles, live websites, clear service pages) that also drives human bookings.

We also think the "rent versus own" debate matters more here than the frontier AI debate. A Facebook page, a Linktree, a third party booking platform: these are all rented infrastructure. The platform sets the terms, holds your customer data, and can change its algorithm or pricing overnight. Whether superintelligent AI arrives in 2030 or 2040, a business that owns its website, its booking system and its customer data will always adapt faster than one that is renting all three. That is a more useful "Plan A" for a small business than anything in a 90 page scenario document.

If you want a clear picture of what you're currently renting, what you're missing on Google, and what a properly automated setup would look like for your business, book a free audit at braynexservices.com. We'll tell you plainly what's costing you money and what isn't worth changing yet.