SMEs Already Have the Software. They Just Don't Use It: What the 2025 EU Data Shows

If you run a company with 20, 50, or 150 employees, you have probably already invested in technology. You have invoicing software, perhaps an ERP, a website, a handful of subscriptions you pay for every month. And if someone asked whether your company is digitalized, you would say yes, to a reasonable extent.

European data tells a different story. Not one about companies that never bought anything, but about companies that bought the tools and use them only on the surface. This article pulls together the latest figures from Eurostat and the European Commission, shows where the gap really is, and gives you a concrete way to check where your own company stands.

What the 2025 Eurostat data shows

Every year, Eurostat measures which technologies are used by companies with at least 10 employees across the EU. The 2025 figures show that the tools most widely adopted are the basic ones, while the tools that turn data into decisions remain a minority:

In other words, fewer than three in ten EU companies use a CRM and roughly one in six uses Business Intelligence software. Paid cloud services have crossed the halfway mark, and AI adoption reached 19.95%, but the differences between countries are huge: AI use ranged from 5.21% to 42.03% depending on the member state.

The bigger picture comes from the indicator the EU officially uses to measure how digital small and medium-sized businesses are: digital intensity. The EU target for 2030 is for more than 90% of SMEs to reach at least a basic level. In 2025, 71% did. That still leaves 29% of SMEs at a very low level of digital intensity, and 35% only at a low level.

Being online is not the same as being digital

The most common confusion we see is between being visible online and actually working digitally. A company can have a polished website, active social media, even an online store, and still run its operations on spreadsheets passed around by email.

The visible part of digitalization is easy to tick off. The part that produces efficiency, meaning customer data in one place, reports that generate themselves, and processes that do not depend on manual copying, is exactly where the Eurostat numbers drop: CRM, Business Intelligence, and automation.

The hidden problem: software you paid for but barely use

Even companies that invested seriously rarely use everything they pay for. A Pendo analysis of usage data across business software products found that 80% of features in the average software product are rarely or never used, while around 12% of features generate 80% of daily usage. In practical terms: the team learns the few screens it needs right away, and the rest of the product, including the reports and automations that would save the most time, stays unexplored.

The second cost is harder to see, because it hides inside the working day. A study published in Harvard Business Review, which followed 137 users across three Fortune 500 companies, showed that workers toggle between applications and windows roughly 1,200 times a day. Reorienting after those switches adds up to just under four hours a week, about 9% of working time. When systems do not talk to each other, every manual data transfer adds to that number.

Seven signs your company uses technology only on the surface

Beyond the statistics, there are practical signs you can check right now. If you recognize at least three of them, your company likely has significant untapped potential in the systems it already pays for:

1. You pay for licenses nobody uses at capacity. Check how many users are active in the tools you subscribe to, and how many of the available features are actually used.

2. The team copies data from one system to another. If someone pulls figures from the invoicing system and types them into a spreadsheet to build a report, you have an integration problem you can often solve with features you already have, without buying anything new.

3. A simple report takes more than 30 minutes. If getting sales figures involves phone calls between departments and manual compilation, the problem is not the software, it is configuration and data flow.

4. Some processes stop when a key person is away. A process that depends on a single person cannot be scaled, improved, or secured.

5. Important decisions are made on intuition, not data. Not because the data does not exist, but because it is not trusted or not accessible quickly enough.

6. Departments work with different versions of the same information. Sales has one number, accounting has another, and nobody has a single source of truth.

7. You cannot quickly answer "who is our most profitable customer or product?" If the answer takes days of manual analysis, the company is operating without one of its most important decision tools.

Why this happens

The main reason is not negligence, nor a lack of investment. It is the absence of an objective evaluation after the purchase.

When you buy software, the vendor presents the features, runs the initial training, and then leaves. What happens afterwards, usually nobody checks. The team uses the functions it needs immediately, and the Pendo data shows this is the normal pattern, not an exception. The rest stays unused, not because it would not help, but because nobody showed the team how to apply it in the context of the business.

The second reason is the lack of an outside perspective. When you are inside daily operations, inefficiencies become normal. The two-hour process "has always been like that." The manual Friday report "is how we have always done it." An external audit does not necessarily uncover things you do not know. It puts them in a context where their cost becomes obvious.

How to measure where your company stands

The EU measures a company's digital intensity based on 12 technologies and practices, from internet connectivity and online presence to cloud services, e-invoicing, and online sales. The more of them a company uses, the higher its level:

• Very low (0-3 out of 12): technology is limited to the bare minimum.
• Low (4-6 out of 12): the company has reached the basic level, the threshold the EU wants more than 90% of SMEs to reach by 2030.
• High (7-9 out of 12): systems are actively used across several areas of the business.
• Very high (10-12 out of 12): digital is part of how the company works.

The score is a starting point, not a verdict. A company can tick cloud and e-invoicing and still lose hours every week to manually copied data. That is why it is worth combining it with a practical five-step check:

Step 1: Inventory what you have. List every tool and subscription you pay for, its cost, and the number of active users.

Step 2: Identify the three biggest time drains. Ask each department what they do manually every day or week. The answers show where the untapped potential is.

Step 3: Check your integrations. Does data sync automatically between systems, or does someone copy it? Every manual transfer is a source of errors. If you conclude that a single integrated platform is the answer, our guide on moving from Excel to ERP covers what the transition looks like in practice.

Step 4: Time a report. Pick the report requested most often and measure how long it takes from request to delivery.

Step 5: Prioritize by impact. Start with the changes that deliver the biggest gain for the smallest effort, not the ones that simply look easiest.

From diagnosis to action

The Eurostat data shows that the gap is no longer access to technology. It is using technology for decisions: CRM, analytics, automation. The good news is that much of this gap can be closed without new investments, starting from the systems your company already pays for. And when a new tool is genuinely needed, our overview of the cost of SME digitalization in 2026 helps you budget it realistically.

The first step is knowing where you stand. The free digital audit builds on the 12 digital intensity criteria, takes 5 minutes, and shows your company's score, its main gaps, and what to improve first.

Published by RIFTER SRL. We accelerate SME digitalization through objective evaluation, personalized strategy, and assisted implementation.