The industries that assumed slow timelines were structural are finding out they were wrong
Paper checks still clear 70 percent of small-business payments. Car loans that once took two months now close in three minutes. Deals that required months of diligence are closing in under two weeks. The pattern is consistent enough across sectors that the inertia looks less like culture and more like missing infrastructure.
Marc Andreessen puts a number on the inertia that is now breaking: 70 percent of small businesses, the kind that run on dental appointments and service calls, are still paid by paper check. That figure would read as a curiosity if it were stable. It is not. Andreessen describes a federal regulatory inflection point driving a digitization shift across that entire population of businesses. The check is not going away because the market finally convinced these operators to change. It is going away because the rules are changing around them.
That regulatory push is one force. The competitive pressure of what digitization already looks like in practice is another. Carlos García, who leads Kavak, the Mexican used-car platform, describes a car loan approval process that typically takes two months or more in Mexico and comparable emerging markets. Kavak approves the same loan in under three minutes. That gap is not an incremental improvement in processing speed. It is a different category of customer experience entirely, and it makes the two-month baseline look less like an industry norm and more like an artifact of pre-digital infrastructure.
The compression of timelines shows up in deal-making as well. Melisa Tokmak describes closing a contract worth half a million dollars, end to end, in 14 days. Robin Nessén reports that his firm completed an acquisition from letter of intent to closing in 12 days, running diligence in-house with their own tool. Both figures sit well below what anyone in those respective industries would have quoted as a realistic floor five years ago. The combination of better tooling, faster information flow, and operators who have decided to move points toward a structural shift rather than isolated hustle.
Usually in Mexico and in some emerging markets it'll get two months or more to get a car loan approved. we usually approve it in under three minutes.Carlos García
The same compression is visible at the platform level. Patrick Collison, Stripe’s chief executive, reports that the new Software as a Service founding cohort on Stripe in 2026 is 103 percent larger than the equivalent 2025 cohort, and that the median 2026 cohort is generating 50 percent more revenue than the comparable 2025 cohort. The hypothesis circulating in some quarters, that AI will severely commoditize software and slow monetization, is running directly against what Stripe’s transaction data shows. Collison is explicit that the company is seeing the exact opposite.
Enterprise spending is moving in the same direction. Brad Gerstner, who runs Altimeter Capital, puts median enterprise spending on knowledge-work AI at 17 times growth over the last 18 months. That is not a number that describes cautious adoption. It describes organizations that have moved from evaluation to deployment at a pace that most enterprise software cycles do not produce.
Tokmak adds a dimension that complicates the standard narrative about which industries resist change. Some of the most technology-forward business owners and founders she has met, she says, come from industries typically written off as old-fashioned. The resistance to digital speed in legacy sectors may be less about the people running them and more about the absence of tools built specifically for them. Jon McNeill makes this structural gap concrete: roughly 300 cybersecurity platforms were built for the cloud in the last five years, and, by his count, zero were built for small and medium-sized businesses over the same period. The tooling gap preceded the cultural one.
Daniel Priestley puts the stakes in longer-range terms: a mathematical certainty, as he frames it, that two-thirds of the businesses that run the economy by valuation will have to change hands in the next 10 to 20 years. That transition, whenever it comes, will land on an infrastructure that is moving faster than the businesses being handed over were built to expect. The industries that assumed their timelines were structurally fixed are finding that the assumption was mostly infrastructural, and the infrastructure is changing faster than the assumption did.