Meta published results on October 14 from a YouGov survey it commissioned of 3,983 small business owners in nine Asia-Pacific markets: 84% use AI, and 43% of those whose business used it in the past year applied it to local advertising and marketing.
What happened
The study covers Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, India, Thailand, Japan and Hong Kong, with data collected between August 6 and September 2, 2026. Of the owners surveyed, 76% report a positive impact on productivity and 71% a positive impact on revenue or sales over the past 12 months. Among owners whose business used AI in that period, 51% used it to create or edit content, 43% for local advertising and marketing, 38% for translation and 37% for customer support and communications.
Meta also reports that 86% of owners say small businesses need more guidance to gain the full benefits of AI. Cost is the leading barrier to training, cited by 51%, and owners asked for clearer information on cost and return on investment and for guidance on data privacy and security.
Why it matters
Advertising is the second most common use named, behind content creation, which places AI-assisted ad work among the first things small businesses try. The release lists Meta’s own tools for those jobs: Advantage+, ads that click to WhatsApp, and Meta Business Agent. We covered the ad assistant side in Meta’s Ad Assistant Gains Memory While Agentic Actions Stay in Testing.
One detail worth reading closely
Every figure is self-reported by owners, and the sponsor sells ad tools to the same group. In our reading, the most useful number for a vendor is the 51% who name cost as the barrier to training, because it points to a gap between adoption and confidence that product teams can address with plain pricing and return-on-investment reporting. Meta’s own GEM conversion figures are a different kind of evidence, measured on its ad surfaces rather than asked in a survey.
Source: Meta Newsroom
