Where entrepreneurs want grants to go next — and how they plan to use AI (Skip survey)

We asked the Skip community of small business owners and founders how they think about grants on Skip today and how they’re using (or plan to use) AI in their businesses. Below are the highlights and key takeways so you know what's  

Summary: Grant Are Critical and AI Adoption Is Growing Extremely Fast

Entrepreneurs on Skip still view grants as mission-critical and check for them frequently (most at least weekly). When forced to choose, they favor fewer, larger awards—$10k grants over $1k instant grants.

Meanwhile, AI has moved from curiosity to urgency: 63% expect it to be a significant or transformative change within a year, and 58% already rate AI as very/extremely important today. The top AI job to be done is help with grants and applications, followed by marketing/ads and website/content, but adoption is held back mainly by cost and questions of relevance.

Methodology: Survey of Skip entrepreneurs (micro and small businesses, typically 1–10 people). Fielded in late Sept/early Oct 2025 via email and in-app. n=534

Grants: importance, behavior, and program design

Grants matter—right now

Grants remain a lifeline for small business owners and entrepreneurs. A strong majority say grants are extremely important to their business right now (83.7%), with another 12.4% saying very important. This confirms why grant programming continues to drive daily engagement and community trust on Skip.

Insight: There have been over 600 grant winners on Skip so far this year.

How often do entrepreneurs check for grants

Grant discovery is a frequent habit: 37.3% check weekly, 27.1% daily, and 16.2% multiple times per day. That cadence supports a feed-style experience and justifies lightweight “what’s new” surfaces between live events.

What types of grants do business owners apply to?

Application behavior isn’t either/or. Most respondents apply to multiple categories: Skip’s $5k–$10k grants (75%), instant grants (73.5%), and external grants found via Skip (65%). This mix suggests our value is curation + access + velocity.

What grants would you want most (if you could only choose 1)?

When asked to pick one format, 60.6% chose the $10k “major” grants, while 39.4% chose the $1k instant grants. Translation: the community values the life-changing upside of larger awards even if they also enjoy the energy and frequency of instant grants.

AI: sentiment, usage, blockers, and use cases

Current importance vs. expected impact

Right now, 33.9% say AI is extremely important and 26.8% say very important. Only ~10% say it’s not really important yet.

Looking ahead, 63.3% expect AI to be transformative or a significant advantage within a year (30.7% transformative, 32.6% significant). The urgency is rising.

Actual usage cadence

37.5% use AI daily and 21% weekly. There’s still a long tail of “Rarely” (16.9%) and “Don’t use yet” (14.4%), which shows that there's a sizable segment that has yet to adopt new AI technologies - but this is changing fast.

What’s blocking AI adoption?

Of the 1/3rd of business owners who are using AI rarely or not at all, two blockers to adoption dominate: Cost (32.5%) and “Not relevant to my business” (31.2%). After that: data privacy/trust (14.3%) and “don’t know where to start” (13%). This tells us our go-to-market should (1) prove concrete ROI fast, (2) speak the customer’s language by industry/use-case, and (3) bake in trust signals and defaults.

The AI jobs to be done

The top three use cases for AI are crystal clear:

• Grants & applications (77.4%)
• Marketing/ads (65.6%)
• Website & content (62.5%)

Business planning (57.9%) and customer messaging/agents (49.8%) follow closely. This maps directly to the AI features Skip has been building—and where to deepen future automation.

Awareness of Skip AI tools

Awareness is highest for “Write with AI” for applications (58.8%) and AI Business Plan (50.4%), followed by Cofounder chat (37.5%), AI Agent for websites/listings (32.4%), and AI Website Creation (28.5%). 24% haven’t used or heard of these yet—another activation pool.

What we’re doing next (based on this data)

We’ll keep the adrenaline of instant grants while leaning into the perceived value of bigger awards—testing cadence and packaging (e.g., pooled entries that ladder into majors). Because many of you check Skip weekly or daily, we’re also investing in a more personalized feed with lightweight updates between lives to sustain momentum.

And there’s something new on the horizon: a proactive, always-on partner that nudges daily actions and delivers results—think grants pipeline, marketing calendar, content, and follow-ups—so your business moves forward even when you’re off the clock.

Huge thanks to everyone who shared feedback. You’re helping shape how we design both grants and AI at Skip. If you’d like to go deeper on any of this—or try the newest AI tools built for business owners—join our next live or check your Skip dashboard.