The analog economy is digitizing faster than its reputation suggested it could

Marc Andreessen puts a number on the analog economy that is easy to underestimate. Around 70 percent of payments in sectors like dental practices still move on paper, and a federal regulatory inflection point is now pushing that world through a digitization revolution. The stat lands differently when you hold it against the broader picture: this is not a niche inefficiency. It describes a wide band of the economy still running on infrastructure from another era.

The same gap between legacy practice and current possibility shows up sharply in emerging markets. Carlos García, who runs Kavak, the used-car marketplace, describes a car loan approval process in Mexico that typically takes two months or more. Kavak now completes the same approval in under three minutes. That compression does not happen by trimming paperwork at the margins. It requires rebuilding the decision logic from the ground up, and the gap it closes is not weeks but orders of magnitude.

García also reports that since Kavak deployed an AI tool for its mechanics, warranty costs have come down around 20 to 26 percent. A separate experiment with an AI agent managing city-level operations produced profits roughly 50 percent above the prior baseline in its first period of operation, short of its target but well above what the pre-AI baseline had delivered. These are operational numbers from a company working in a market that most observers would classify as structurally difficult, not a natural testbed for rapid technology deployment.

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 deal side carries its own version of the story. Melisa Tokmak, an investor who has worked with companies in sectors traditionally considered slow to close, describes a contract worth around half a million dollars that went from first contact to signed agreement in 14 days. She also pushes back on a common assumption about who is actually driving this shift, noting that some of the most tech-forward founders and owners she has encountered operate in old-school industries. The digitization pressure is not arriving from outside these sectors and meeting resistance. In many cases it is coming from within.

Daniel Priestley adds a structural argument that gives the timeline an edge of necessity. He estimates that two thirds of the businesses that run the economy by valuation will have to change hands in the next 10 to 15 to 20 years. Ownership transitions are moments when legacy processes get re-examined, when the case for keeping paper-based systems weakens, and when new operators bring different defaults. If Priestley’s framing holds, the digitization window is not optional. It is a feature of an unavoidable succession event playing out across the economy over the coming decades.

What makes these data points worth reading together is not that any one of them is surprising in isolation. Car loans closing in under three minutes instead of two months is a logical application of modern credit modeling. A well-prepared enterprise sale closing in two weeks is possible when both sides are aligned. What is worth noting is the simultaneity: payments, lending, contracts, and ownership transitions are all hitting inflection points at roughly the same moment, in sectors that shared a reputation for being immune to this kind of pace. The reputation was always partly wrong, as Tokmak’s observation about tech-forward founders in old-school industries suggests. But the pace is now making the lag impossible to ignore.