In 2026, the SME AI market is finally taking a useful turn. Anthropic is starting to speak the language of small businesses, while the French government is preparing a catalog of sovereign AI offerings to help leaders identify serious solutions hosted in Europe and sized for their operations. Business translation: for a small business or SME, AI is no longer just a topic to monitor, it is a real opportunity to launch a first use case that is useful, measurable, and realistic.
The SME opportunity
The real signal is not the technology. It is the budget. Even today, 80% of French SMEs invest less than €5,000 in AI. In other words: many companies want to move forward, but without launching a moonshot. Good news, it is possible.
With a total investment often between €2,500 and €5,000, an SME can already fund a well-scoped first project: customer support automation, lead qualification, document summarization, internal drafting assistance, or case triage. The key is not to try to 'do AI' in the broad sense, but to target a single process that consumes time and delivers a direct gain. Chosen well, this type of project can deliver an ROI above 100% over 12 to 24 months.
The current two-sided advantage is smart: on one side, Anthropic is making Claude easier to understand for smaller organizations; on the other, the future public registry of sovereign offerings will make it easier to select solutions that are closer to European requirements. The result: less time wasted benchmarking, more time executing.
The risk to watch
The trap is confusing accessibility with simplicity. A proprietary LLM can become a lock-in risk if your prompts, workflows, and use cases depend too heavily on a single vendor. If pricing rises or the model changes, you are stuck.
Another common pitfall is choosing a trendy solution that is oversized for the actual need. A tool that is too complex, even if inexpensive, can end up as a polished POC that is never used. And the real hidden cost is not the license: it is scoping, team enablement, process redesign, and post-deployment support.
Chronic underinvestment also creates a false sense of progress. Multiplying small AI subscriptions without a minimum architecture is just stacking gadgets. One well-integrated use case is worth more than a scattered collection of tools.
The compliance angle
Yes, the topic touches GDPR, Switzerland's nFADP, and the AI Act. Not because you need to panic, but because you need to design properly. If you send personal or sensitive data to a model operated outside the EU, you need to govern the transfers, limit the data you send, and put the right contracts in place. For HR, finance, or healthcare use cases, caution is not optional.
The right approach is often to keep raw data on European or Swiss infrastructure, and send only the necessary excerpts to the model, pseudonymized whenever possible. The sovereign offerings catalog expected from the government will help identify solutions that are more compatible with these constraints.
Conclusion & Cohesium support
The right reflex in 2026 is not to 'do AI', but to launch a first use case that is profitable, compliant, and easy to manage. Rather than cobbling things together, Cohesium AI can support you with an SME AI Pack 2026: a strategic audit of your business priorities, selection of 2 to 3 high-ROI use cases, workflow automation, GDPR/nFADP scoping, and deployment on an architecture tailored to your budget.
Goal: turn a few thousand euros into tangible gains, without creating technical debt or unnecessary legal risk. Contact us to discuss a Custom Integration or a Strategic Audit.