Legacy industries are digitizing faster than the institutions built around their slowness can adapt

Marc Andreessen puts the baseline condition plainly: 70 percent of small businesses are still paid on paper, and the sector is now going through what he describes as “a massive digitization revolution” driven by a federal regulatory inflection point. That figure is not a relic from a decade ago. It describes the current state of industries that touch ordinary economic life every day, from dental offices to contractors to local service providers. The gap between where these businesses operate and where technology already is turns out to be both enormous and, suddenly, closable.

The car market in Mexico illustrates what closing that gap looks like in practice. Carlos García, the founder of Kavak, the used-car marketplace, describes a loan approval process that typically runs two months or more across Mexico and similar emerging markets. Kavak has brought that down to under three minutes. That is not a software-adjacent improvement at the edges of the business. It is a rewrite of the core transaction. García also reports that warranty costs dropped somewhere between 20 and 26 percent since the company deployed an AI tool for mechanics, a concrete operational gain in a domain where the friction has always been physical and human.

The deal-speed data point from Melisa Tokmak, who works with enterprise customers in sectors not known for moving quickly, fits the same pattern. One contract her team closed came in at roughly half a million dollars and ran from first contact to signed agreement in 14 days. Her broader observation is worth noting alongside that figure: some of the most tech-forward founders and owners she has encountered operate in what most people would call old-school industries. The assumption that legacy sectors are populated by technophobic operators resistant to change is, in her experience, simply wrong.

Usually in Mexico and in some emerging markets it'll get like two months or more to get a car loan approved. We usually approve it in under three minutes. Carlos García

The macro pressure behind these individual cases is structural. Daniel Priestley argues 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 transfer of ownership, at that scale, creates an enormous forcing function. Incoming owners with different risk tolerances and tool sets will not inherit analog processes by default. Travis Kalanick frames the industrial technology layer directly: he describes industrial AI as something that will automate multiple hundred-billion- to trillion-dollar industries. That is a long-horizon claim, but it maps onto the near-term evidence in a coherent way.

What the evidence suggests, taken together, is not simply that technology is available to these industries. It is that the conditions for adoption have changed at the same time. Regulatory shifts are pushing small businesses off paper. Operational pressure is pushing companies toward AI tools that produce measurable cost reductions. Deal velocity in enterprise software is outpacing what buyers in traditional sectors thought was possible. And the generational ownership transition Priestley describes will deliver a large share of the economy into the hands of people who will not accept two-month loan approvals or paper check cycles as fixed costs of operation.

The question is not whether these industries will digitize. The directional answer is already visible in the data. The more useful question is what happens to the incumbents, vendors, and institutional arrangements built around the assumption that slow was permanent. The industries that ran on paper did so because the alternatives were not good enough, cheap enough, or fast enough. That condition is ending, and it is ending faster than the businesses serving those sectors have yet priced in.