Industry Reads
What we are reading: technology, AI, and operations news that matters for small business, with our take on why it matters for yours.
The ERP Payoff Lands After Go-Live, Not At It
Clorox began replacing decades-old supply chain systems in 2021 as part of a five-year digitization program, and its CFO now expects the operational gains, better demand planning, lower inventory, and more automation, to land in the current fiscal year. The company was candid that the cutover disrupted fulfillment before it improved it. The lesson scales down cleanly: a system replacement does not create value at go-live, it creates value once the process around it stabilizes, and that holds whether the budget is $500 million or $50,000.
Nearly Every Small Business Runs on Tech Now. Most Run on Four or More Tools.
The Chamber's Empowering Small Business research finds 99 percent of small businesses use at least one technology platform, most use four or more, and a third juggle six-plus. AI use has more than doubled since 2023, and 82 percent of adopters grew their workforce. Read the tool counts as a warning label, though: every added platform is another place your data lives, and disconnected tools are how a business ends up working for its software instead of the reverse.
Software Regret Is Real, and It Starts Before the Purchase
Among this piece's tech trends for small business, one deserves its own headline: the prevalence of software regret, owners who bought tools that never fit and now sit unused. The recommended fixes, reading reviews and testing trials, help, but they skip the root cause. Software regret is usually a requirements problem: nobody defined the process the tool was supposed to serve, so no demo could reveal the mismatch.
AI Moves From Experiment to Strategic Asset for Small Business
The U.S. Chamber's CO- reports that 2026 is the year small businesses stop treating AI as a gadget and start treating it as a strategic asset, one that lowers barriers and lets small teams compete with much larger ones. The piece lands on a point we would underline twice: the businesses winning with AI still lean on human relationships and trust to grow. Technology multiplies a sound operation; it does not substitute for one.
Three in Four Small Businesses Use AI. One in Seven Has Actually Integrated It.
Goldman Sachs surveyed small business owners and found 76 percent now use AI, with 93 percent reporting a positive impact, yet only 14 percent have fully integrated it into core operations. That gap between trying AI and running on it is the whole story: tools are easy to adopt, but integration requires defined processes and structured data underneath. The 73 percent asking for more training are really asking for a foundation.
Before You Sign That SaaS Contract, Read the Data Return Clause
This guide walks through what to demand in every SaaS agreement before you depend on it: machine-readable export formats, defined data return timelines, and zero fees for retrieving what is yours. It also catalogs the traps, like proprietary export formats that make your own records unreadable anywhere else. This is the data ownership problem in contract form, and the time to negotiate your exit is before you move in.