AI enablement · U.S. Census data, updated biweekly
Where Does Your Business Stand on AI?
Two clicks. Real government data. No form to fill out. The U.S. Census Bureau asks businesses every two weeks whether they use AI — here is what your industry answered.
Your Industry
Across the Southeast: AL 19.7% · GA 26.9% · FL 23.7% · TN 22.6% · MS 15.4% · SC 19.4% · NC 22.4% (national 21.8%).
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS) — share of businesses answering “yes” to AI use in any business function in the last two weeks. Reference period Jul 13, 2026 – Jul 26, 2026; retrieved 2026-08-26.
The cost of standing still
Doing Nothing Is Expensive. The Traditional Fix Fails Too Often.
IT projects becomes a “black swan” — a 200% average cost overrun.
Bent Flyvbjerg & Alexander Budzier, ‘Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think,’ Harvard Business Review 89(9), 2011
of IT spend goes to just keeping existing systems running.
U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-25-107795: Agencies Need to Plan for Modernizing Critical Decades-Old Legacy Systems, 2025
of operational spreadsheets, professionally audited, contained errors.
Raymond R. Panko, ‘What We Don’t Know About Spreadsheet Errors Today,’ Proceedings of the EuSpRIG 2015 Conference, 2015
And here is the finding that should sting: even among firms already using AI, use concentrates in office functions — sales and marketing leads at 52% — while production, quality, supply chains, and distribution rank at the bottom. Nearly everyone’s AI writes emails. Almost nobody’s AI runs operations. For an industrial business, the operational advantage is still unclaimed.
The third path
The Build-vs-Buy Math Has Flipped.
For thirty years the choice was binary: a commercial platform that fits most of your process and charges per seat forever, or custom software you could never afford. AI enablement ends that trade. A tool purpose-built to your process — your terminology, your reports, your approval chain — is now the faster, cheaper option.
Vendor Reports, Finally Made Useful
A supplier emails a monthly PDF. An AI-built pipeline reads each one, accumulates the history the vendor’s own portal cannot show, and renders a live trend dashboard. No new system. No new licenses.
The Workbook That Rebuilds Itself
A cost workbook that took days to assemble by hand is regenerated from its source data in minutes — formatted to your standard, checked against its own totals, ready for issue.
The Monday Brief That Assembles Itself
Project files, schedules, and correspondence are swept automatically; a prioritized brief lands in the inbox before the week starts — built for exactly one reader.
The Gap Is the Opportunity. The Window Is Six Months.
Tell us where your business runs on hand-built spreadsheets and systems that fight you — we'll tell you what an AI-built tool could do about it.
Or email admin@waypoint-controls.com
Sources: U.S. Census Bureau, Business Trends and Outlook Survey (BTOS) · Bent Flyvbjerg & Alexander Budzier, ‘Why Your IT Project May Be Riskier Than You Think,’ Harvard Business Review 89(9), 2011 · U.S. Government Accountability Office, GAO-25-107795: Agencies Need to Plan for Modernizing Critical Decades-Old Legacy Systems, 2025 · Raymond R. Panko, ‘What We Don’t Know About Spreadsheet Errors Today,’ Proceedings of the EuSpRIG 2015 Conference, 2015 · U.S. Census Bureau working paper CES-WP-26-25, ‘The Microstructure of AI Diffusion: Evidence from Firms, Business Functions, and Worker Tasks’, 2026