Generative AI has made marketing content cheaper than ever before. Text, images and video can now be produced at a marginal cost approaching zero, and experimental evidence suggests that AI-generated assets can hold their own against professionally produced material. For a one-person business, whose most obvious shortage has always been the capacity to produce enough marketing, that sounds like a revolution. But cheaper production is not the same thing as better marketing — and a new peer-reviewed paper, published on 1 November 2026 in the journal Administrative Sciences, asks what that difference means for the smallest firms in Europe.
A Literature Built for Companies That Barely Exist in Greece
Almost everything researchers know about AI in marketing has been learned from large organisations: companies with dedicated marketing departments, data infrastructure and budgets for building new capabilities. Micro-enterprises encounter exactly the same tools — without any of that organisational apparatus. That mismatch is the starting point of the review, and Greece offers an unusually sharp case for examining it.
The numbers are striking. Of roughly 731,829 Greek enterprises, 99.9% are small or medium-sized, together employing 83.5% of the workforce and generating 57% of value added. Look closer and the concentration becomes extreme: 94.7% of non-agricultural Greek firms employ fewer than ten people — a share that climbs to 98.7% in professional, scientific and technical activities, the sector where most digital service ventures are registered. Greece, the authors argue, is not simply an SME economy but a micro-enterprise economy. Any theory of technology adoption derived from large firms therefore describes a population that hardly exists there.
The 673,000 Firms No Statistic Can See
On paper, the Greek picture looks bleak. According to Eurostat, 8.93% of Greek enterprises used AI in 2025, compared with an EU-27 average of 19.95% — and the European Commission's 2026 Digital Decade country report describes enterprise AI adoption in Greece as low and the digital transformation of SMEs as slow.
Yet these headline figures carry a limitation that is rarely spelled out: the Eurostat enterprise survey only covers firms with ten or more employees. Roughly 673,000 Greek micro-enterprises — the overwhelming majority of the business population — fall outside it entirely. The national enterprise survey of the Greek National Documentation Center, covering 12,213 firms, draws the same line by defining SMEs as businesses with 10 to 249 employees. In other words, three independent official sources are structurally incapable of observing the very firms the paper is concerned with. The authors conclude that the lack of evidence on AI adoption among Greek micro-enterprises is, at least in part, an artefact of how evidence is collected rather than a reflection of what these firms actually do.
Four Pressures, One Open Question
The review is motivated by four interlocking problems:
- A persistent adoption gap that has survived years of national digitalisation efforts, linked in policy analysis to the coexistence of a dynamic entrepreneurial scene and an entrenched administrative burden.
- Resource asymmetry and tool fragmentation, as founders assemble their marketing capability from freemium and low-cost apps — without integrated data infrastructure or strategic alignment.
- Institutional and regulatory friction, from locally rooted consumer trust and the limitations of language technology in Modern Greek to compliance obligations under the EU AI Act and the GDPR.
- An empirical knowledge gap: the marketing literature offers few integrated frameworks for resource-constrained ventures in peripheral Southern European economies — a gap independently identified from within the digital entrepreneurship field itself.
From these pressures emerges the paper's guiding question: how do digital entrepreneurs in Greece leverage and integrate AI into their marketing practices — and what determines whether adoption succeeds or stalls in a resource-constrained environment?
To answer it, the authors conducted an integrative review of 74 sources spanning marketing, information systems, entrepreneurship research, computational linguistics and policy analysis — research communities that rarely cite one another. The value of the approach lies precisely in connecting these parallel conversations. What that synthesis reveals about absorptive capacity, grant eligibility, language resources and the EU AI Act is set out in full in the open-access paper.
Read the Full Paper
Harkiolakis, T., Alserhan, B. A., Halkias, D., & Alsarhan, F. (2026). AI in Marketing Practices of Greek Micro-Enterprises: An Integrative Review. Administrative Sciences, 16(11), 529.
Read the open-access paper: doi.org/10.3390/admsci16110529
About the Author: Prof. Dr. Daphne Halkias
Prof. Dr. Daphne Halkias is Dean and Professor in the Doctoral Programs at the European Institute of Management. Holding a PhD in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, she brings 30 years of experience as an academic, researcher, international executive coach and business consultant. She is the author of 15 academic books and more than 100 peer-reviewed papers, and serves as editor of the International Journal of Teaching and Case Study, the International Journal of Technology-Enhanced Learning and the International Journal of Social Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
Her research spans entrepreneurship, family business, leadership, sustainability, innovation and research methods. Small firms in the Greek economy are a long-standing thread in her work — including her study of immigrant-owned small firms in Greece published in International Migration — and in 2021 Scopus listed her among the top ten scholars in female entrepreneurship. Her co-authored book The Multiple Case Study Design, written with EIM colleagues Michael Neubert and Nicholas Harkiolakis, is a methodological reference for management researchers.
From Research to Practice
The question at the heart of this paper — what separates having AI tools from knowing how to turn them into results — is one that founders, SME leaders and researchers face alike. EIM's MBA in Professional Services and SME Management prepares leaders to steer small and growing firms through exactly this kind of technological shift, while the Award in AI in Business offers a focused entry point for professionals who want to apply AI strategically rather than experimentally. And for those who want to contribute original research to questions like these, EIM's PhD in Management and Doctor of Business Administration — led by Prof. Dr. Halkias as Dean of Doctoral Programs — provide a fully online, research-driven pathway.
Curious how research like this connects to your own career? Book a one-on-one consultation to discuss EIM's programmes.