Enabling SMBs to Scale Smarter and Faster with Upwork Business Plus

With ever-shifting market changes and AI-driven growth, business leaders are compelled to do more with less, catalyze innovation, maintain a competitive edge, and scale their businesses ambitiously. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are fast becoming the heroes of the AI revolution: bold innovators reshaping what’s possible when tapping into Upwork’s human ingenuity coupled with the latest AI tools. They’re adopting a growth mindset that values adaptability and experimentation, enabling them to move quickly, find talent with the right skills, and scale intentionally to get critical work done. 

SMBs are winning with AI and flexible talent

A new research study from the Upwork Research Institute, The Key to Growth: How Small Businesses Turn Disruption Into an Edge, reveals that SMBs are embracing a new playbook for success rooted in innovation that draws on AI, flexible talent, and bold experimentation to weather a challenging macroenvironment. 

Key findings from the research show that highly confident SMBs are:

• Innovating through disruption: Confidence among SMB leaders more sharply fluctuated throughout the year compared to leaders of other company sizes, dropping from 51% in Q1 2025 to 47% in Q2, then rebounding to 58% in Q3, mirroring similar swings in their willingness to innovate across talent models and technology. Yet for the 47% of leaders who maintained steady confidence throughout the year, their commitment to AI, flexible talent, and rapid experimentation never wavered.
• Harnessing AI to drive operational agility: SMBs that avoided the Q2 confidence dip were twice as likely to have fully implemented AI-powered solutions across front-office (27%) and back-office (23%) functions to drive efficiencies in sales, marketing, finance, and operations. Thirty percent retooled operating models for AI, adopting an AI-first mindset when designing processes.
• Leveraging flexible, skilled talent: Thirty-one percent of SMB leaders surveyed rely on flexible talent to tap into specialized skills. Job posts from SMBs seeking AI expertise rose 44% on the Upwork Marketplace between January and July 2025, indicating strong demand for AI-proficient talent. 
• Unlocking tangible value with AI: Supplemental research conducted in collaboration with Zoom found that when SMBs use AI to scale, 93% report an increase in revenue—in fact, 41% report increases exceeding 10%. Eighty-two percent report AI-related cost reductions, and 91% saw year-over-year ROI from their AI investments.
• Embedding experimentation: Twenty-three percent of SMB leaders designated innovation and experimentation as core organizational capabilities, approaching disruption and change as opportunities to grow in new and unconventional ways.

The message from our research is clear: SMBs that see AI tools as core capabilities, invest in skills, and build flexible teams are not only driving efficiency but realizing measurable business gains, even amid disruption and uncertainty. 

Introducing Upwork’s purpose-built solution for SMBs 

Running a small but growing business means wearing many hats. Leaders are setting strategy, jumping into execution, and constantly keeping projects and hiring on track. Flexibility isn’t just a nice-to-have—it’s how work gets done. That’s why so many business owners and team leaders are turning to Upwork Business Plus, the premium offering designed to meet the needs of growing SMBs to quickly find skilled professionals who can plug in when and where they’re needed most.

As businesses of all sizes leverage the Upwork Marketplace to scale smarter, Business Plus brings together AI and collaboration tools that help teams hire the right talent and start executing faster. It’s purpose-built for growing companies—so teams can work together and stay aligned as they scale.

With Business Plus, SMBs gain instant access to Expert-Vetted talent, the top 1% of talent on the Upwork Marketplace, including freelancers and agencies across more than 125 categories of work, from AI engineers and brand designers to fractional CFOs. The offering also includes built-in tools for performance tracking, contract management and team collaboration, such as centralized dashboards, consolidated billing, and real-time project visibility.

We’ve supercharged Business Plus with the introduction of Uma Recruiter, a new always-on, AI-powered hiring agent that understands business needs, reviews talent profiles, and delivers top matches, enabling faster, smarter hiring decisions. Uma Recruiter draws from experience to help identify the right fit for each role, leveraging Uma’s best-in-class LLMs, tuned and customized for real-world hiring scenarios. When posting a job, clients can now request a shortlist, and Uma Recruiter will source proposals and deliver a curated list of top-matching talent within six hours. Uma Recruiter evaluates everything from core skills and experience to Marketplace reputation, project cost and rate alignment, to proposal quality, ensuring that businesses and talent find the best fit faster.

For SMBs, hiring on the Upwork Marketplace is often a team effort. Business Plus enables multiple stakeholders to evaluate candidates, share feedback, and move seamlessly from shortlisting to onboarding in one coordinated workflow. With shared dashboards and transparent reviews, hiring leads can make faster, better-informed hiring decisions as a team.

Proof in action: SMBs accelerate work outcomes‍

For a real-world example, look no further than Omic.AI, a biotech company using AI to accelerate disease research and therapy discovery. Their team turned to the Upwork Marketplace to scale quickly and cost-effectively. By bringing together specialized freelancers from eight countries – including AI engineers, data scientists, and research analysts – the company compressed what would have been years of traditional computational screening into a few months. With this global team of freelancers found and hired on the Upwork Marketplace, Omic.AI has simulated millions of drug interactions, built digital twins of human diseases, and eliminated 95% of ineffective drug candidates before costly lab testing—achieving outcomes typically requiring a $20 million budget. 

Similarly, Lighthouse, an SMB that operates a real estate platform, tapped talent on the Upwork Marketplace for technical support, creative design, and AI product innovation. By hiring flexible talent for back-end development, design refinement, and generative AI chatbot development, Lighthouse scaled quickly, kept its team lean, and delivered value-added features like AI-powered apartment searches—all while saving roughly $100,000 in hiring costs.

“I love the platform and the amount of talent I have access to. We really couldn’t be this far along without help from the talent on the Upwork Marketplace.” - Matt See, CEO and Co-Founder of Lighthouse

These exemplary small businesses are finding success by leveraging flexible talent solutions and leaning into AI tools and expert talent.

The future of work belongs to SMBs that adapt

SMBs are the backbone of the global economy—and their impact is only growing. Those defining the next decade will be the most adaptable to shifting ways of work, where business resilience is about reinvention. As SMBs mature, their hiring models evolve from individual engagements to coordinated, team-based collaboration across roles and projects. 

At Upwork, we’re proud to support all the growth-oriented SMBs that are architecting their own AI-powered business transformations.

Join them and explore Business Plus to start scaling your small business today.