Most Sarawak SMEs Already Use AI. The Sales Problem Is Somewhere Else.

By Stephanie Lam · 2026-11-03 · 5 min read

On 22 October 2026, around 40 Sarawak business owners spent a morning with us at iCube Kuching. The SME Impact Workshop. Three hours, a working session rather than a seminar, hosted with iCube as venue sponsor and event partner.

I want to publish what the room told us, because it contradicts the thing most people assume.

The assumption worth killing

Business owners do not have a sales problem because they do not know AI.

Most of them are already using it. That is not a prediction, it is what they told us on the registration form before they walked in.

83% were already using AI in some form. Only 17% had not started at all.

So the room was not AI-illiterate. It was AI-busy. And still stuck.

What they were actually using it for

Here is where it breaks. Of the same group:

• 83% are using AI in some form
• 11% have it built into how they work

That gap is the whole story. Almost everyone is using AI. Almost nobody has it running anything. It sits beside the business as a faster typist, not inside the business as a system.

And then the mismatch

We asked two separate questions. What is costing you the most right now, and what do you want covered.

What they asked to be taught:

• 44% how to use AI in marketing and sales
• 17% content that brings sales, not just followers
• 17% how to build a funnel with the highest ROI
• 7% a follow-up system for higher reply and sales

What they said was actually costing them:

• 35% no system, it all sits in my head or in WhatsApp

Read those two lists together. 44% asked to be taught the tool. 7% asked for the follow-up system. And 35% named not having a system as the single most expensive thing in their business.

They were asking for the tool, not the fix. They want AI to run a process that does not exist yet.

The other finding, which surprised the room

We asked what is costing you the most right now, with multiple answers allowed.

93% named something other than low enquiry volume. Only 7% said not enough enquiries was their only problem.

Almost everyone in that room had a problem that happens after the enquiry has already arrived. The follow-up that did not happen. The quote that was sent and forgotten. The WhatsApp thread that went quiet. The team with no capacity to chase.

Lead volume, the thing most SME workshops are built to fix, was close to the bottom of the list.

Why this matters if you were not in the room

If you are about to spend money on AI training, or on more ads, the order matters more than the tool.

AI cannot run a process that was never written down. When you ask it to write a follow-up, it does not know who you sell to, what they are afraid of, what they say when they object, or why anyone picks you. None of that exists in a form it can read, because 35% of this room keep it in their head or in a chat thread.

So the output comes back generic, and you rewrite it by hand, and you conclude AI does not work for your business.

The prompt was never the problem.

What we would tell an owner to do first

Get the business out of your head. One page is enough to start: who you are for, what you sell, what happens in the sixty seconds after someone enquires, and what happens on day three when they go quiet.

Then hand that to AI, or to a staff member, or to an agency. All three suddenly work better, for the same reason.

Thank you

To iCube as venue sponsor and event partner, and to the 40 owners who answered the form honestly enough to make this worth publishing.

Questions we were asked