AI Tool Adoption in Canadian Small and Medium Enterprises: A Case Study from a Multi-Customer Deployment

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) increasingly serve as the deployment context for artificial intelligence (AI) tools, yet the academic literature on AI adoption remains weighted toward large-enterprise settings. This paper offers a practitioner case study of AI tool adoption at the SMB scale, drawing on the author's direct operational experience deploying AI agents through a small SaaS platform (Platco.ai) to a documented Canadian customer (Peel Car Sales, an automotive retailer in Mississauga, Ontario) and a small number of additional customers across verticals including real estate, healthcare, restaurants, fitness, retail, legal services, and home services. The paper documents operational realities of SMB AI adoption that are systematically absent from current literature: onboarding patterns, integration friction with existing tools, the trust-and-control trade-off in autonomous-agent decisions, and adoption-versus-abandonment signals visible in the first weeks of deployment. The methodology is a single-platform case study with autoethnographic and observational elements, drawing on direct operational observation and anonymized customer interaction data collected over twelve months. Findings suggest that successful SMB AI adoption is bounded less by model capability and more by integration depth, workflow fit, and task-level trust calibration. The paper contributes a practitioner-grounded framework for studying SMB AI adoption as a research subject distinct from enterprise AI adoption, intended as the starting point for further empirical and comparative work.