This is the first of a three-part series on AI in the service industry. Part 2 looks at what pet businesses actually ask AI to do. Part 3 is a maturity ladder you can score yourself against.
Where we stand. We build Petboost, booking and business software for pet businesses, and it has an AI assistant in it. Read the parts about software with that in mind. The research is other people's, and every source is listed at the foot of the page.
Every few weeks someone asks me whether they are behind on AI. Usually a groomer or a daycare owner who has watched a video of someone running a business from a chat window and wondered what they are missing.
The honest answer is that most service businesses are working this out at the same time, and the research from the last year is more useful than the videos. It says where AI is genuinely earning its keep, where customers are drawing lines, and why some businesses see a result and others just get another tab open.
Adoption has stalled at about four in ten
The National AI Centre tracks Australian small and medium businesses every month. In February 2026, 44% were using AI, and the quarter as a whole came in at 43%, slightly down on the quarter before. After two years of steep growth, it has levelled out.
NAB's April 2026 survey of around 670 businesses landed in the same place, with 42% using AI. The interesting part is the split by industry. Half of accommodation, café and restaurant businesses already use it and another 39% plan to, leaving only one in ten with no plans at all. Retail sits at 22%.
Size matters more than anything. Micro businesses with a handful of staff are well behind small businesses with a few more.
Overseas figures are all over the place because each survey asks the question differently. The US Census Bureau puts American business use between 17% and 20% for late 2025 into 2026, while a US Chamber of Commerce survey put small business use of generative AI near 58%. The UK statistics office measured 25% at the end of 2025. Read any single headline figure with care.
What it means for a pet business: most of you are micro businesses, so you are in the group that is furthest behind. That is a different thing from being late. Hospitality, the service trade closest to yours in how it deals with the public, is where adoption is strongest, and it may be the closest guide to where pet services head next.
What service businesses actually use it for
The two biggest uses in the National AI Centre data are writing content and analysing data, at 54% each of businesses using AI. Not robots. Words and numbers.
That matches the most-researched service setting there is: health care, where AI scribes listen to a consultation and draft the notes. Australian GP use of AI scribes went from 22% to 40% in a little over a year, according to a poll reported by the RACGP. One large US health system recorded nearly 16,000 hours of note-writing saved across 7,260 doctors, and 88% of the doctors surveyed said it improved their visits. A study across six US health systems found burnout fell from 51.9% to 38.8% after a month of use, though without a control group and with data from the scribe's own maker.
The lesson travels. AI earned its place first on the work that happens after the real work: the notes, the write-up, the admin that eats the evening.
Why most owners have not started
Among Australian businesses not using AI, the National AI Centre found 65% cite distrust or wanting to keep human control, 54% say it is not relevant to them, and 19% do not know how to start.
The "not relevant" answer is the one I would push back on for a pet business. Nobody is suggesting AI clips a dog or walks one. But the messages, the descriptions, the notes and the end-of-week numbers are exactly the writing and data work that the businesses already using AI lean on most.
The distrust answer deserves respect. It is shared by your clients.
Customers are warier than owners
The University of Melbourne and KPMG's 2025 study found only 36% of Australians are willing to trust AI, while 78% are concerned about negative outcomes. A YouGov poll of 1,031 Australians, commissioned by a cloud communications company, found people say they are patient with 90% of phone calls handled by a human, against 53% of conversations with an AI chatbot. Almost half (49%) would rather start with a person even if it takes longer, and 84% said an easy handover from AI to a human matters.
Globally the message is the same. In Gartner's August 2026 survey, 87% of customers said companies using AI in customer service must offer a way to reach a person, even though half said AI made their interactions easier.
Australian businesses are partly there. About half check AI output before it reaches a customer, but the National AI Centre found telling customers about AI use lags well behind, and summed it up neatly: "practice is ahead of policy".
What it means for a pet business: your clients are trusting you with an animal, not ordering a coffee. If AI writes to them, tell them. If AI answers them, keep a person one tap away. Those two rules will matter more to your reputation than which tool you pick.
The phone is still where a lot of service work starts
Pet businesses run on the phone, and it is the hardest part of the day to cover. The research here is thinner and older than it should be. Call-tracking data from 2021 found 26% of calls from potential customers went unanswered, and only 2% of those callers left a voicemail. That came from one vendor's own customers, so treat it as a direction rather than a number for your business.
Booking behaviour points the same way. A vet booking platform reports 43% of online vet appointments are made outside office hours. A salon software company found 46% of salon bookings happened while the salon was closed, though that was 2019 data.
When the phone rings and your hands are wet, the choice is not between AI and a person. It is between a call that goes somewhere and one that goes nowhere.
Built in beats bolted on
The Reserve Bank's survey of larger Australian firms found two thirds have adopted AI, but nearly 40% of those only minimally. Adoption is easy. Getting a result is the hard part.
The pattern across the research is that AI pays off where it sits inside the work and can see the record. Scribes work because they live inside the consult and write straight into the file. A general chat window in another tab cannot see your clients, your prices or who is booked tomorrow unless you paste them in, so you end up copying both ways and checking every answer.
That is how we have built AI inside Petboost. Grazi, the assistant in every plan, reads the business's live bookings, clients and takings and answers questions about them. It drafts in the business's voice. It cannot book, cancel, charge or send anything; a person reads it and presses the button. We chose that on purpose, for the reasons in the customer research above.
What is missing: nobody has asked pet businesses
There is no credible survey of AI use among groomers, boarders, daycares, walkers, sitters and trainers. The vet profession is starting to measure itself. Beauty and home services have vendor surveys. Pet services have anecdotes.
So in Part 2 we look at what we can see: the questions pet businesses actually ask the AI inside their booking system, described in words and anonymised. In Part 3 we turn the research into a ladder you can score yourself against.
If you would rather skip to the score, the free AI readiness assessment takes about ten minutes and asks for no email.
Sources
- National AI Centre, AI adoption insights: December 2025 to February 2026, first published May 2026. ai.gov.au.
- NAB, SME Business Insights: Embracing AI, April 2026. NAB News (PDF).
- Reserve Bank of Australia, Technology Investment and AI: What Are Firms Telling Us?, Bulletin, November 2025. rba.gov.au.
- University of Melbourne and KPMG, Trust, attitudes and use of AI: a global study 2025, Australia snapshot. KPMG (PDF).
- YouGov poll of 1,031 Australians for a cloud communications company, Decoding Digital Patience, October 2025.
- Gartner, customer survey on GenAI in customer service, August 2026. Press release.
- RACGP newsGP, GPs' AI scribe use doubles in one year, December 2025. newsGP.
- Kaiser Permanente Division of Research, AI-assisted note-taking gains steady support, April 2025. Kaiser Permanente.
- Olson et al., ambient AI scribes and clinician burnout, JAMA Network Open, October 2025. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2025.34976.
- US Census Bureau, Large Firms With at Least 20 Employees Biggest AI Users, May 2026. census.gov.
- US Chamber of Commerce, Empowering Small Business, August 2025. uschamber.com.
- UK Office for National Statistics, Business insights and impact on the UK economy, 8 January 2026. ons.gov.uk.
- Invoca, missed sales and appointment-setting calls, November 2021. Press release.
- A vet booking platform's published after-hours booking figures, read at the time of writing; a salon software company's 2019 after-hours booking analysis, reported by HJI.