Americans are starting businesses at a pace the economy hasn't seen in decades. The U.S. Census Bureau counted 578,926 new business applications in July 2026, up 8.1% from June on a seasonally adjusted basis, keeping the country well above pre-2020 levels.
What happens inside those businesses is changing too. Small companies are running on more software than ever, and automation is becoming a bigger part of everyday operations.
More software, more room to connect it
The U.S. Chamber of Commerce's 2025 technology survey found that 99% of small businesses use at least one technology platform. Fifty-eight percent use four or more, and nearly a third use six or more, covering everything from marketing and customer communication to payroll and accounting.
Intuit QuickBooks surveyed business owners and executives and found their teams still spend an average of 25 hours a week on manual data entry and reconciliation between those systems. When asked what would help most, 72% wanted more automation and 64% wanted better integration between their applications.
Where the time is really going
Salesforce's Small & Medium Business Trends study surveyed 3,350 SMB leaders worldwide and found that 66% of businesses with growing revenue had an integrated technology stack, compared with 32% of businesses with declining revenue. Growing businesses were about twice as likely to report that their systems were integrated.
NerdWallet's 2025 survey of UK business owners found they spent an average of 7.3 hours a week on administrative and operational tasks, plus 7.0 hours on financial management. A third of respondents were still managing finances manually, using spreadsheets or pen and paper. Separate research from Sage estimated that small businesses lose 24 working days a year to financial administration, including invoicing, chasing payments and correcting errors. Nearly half of the CEOs and COOs surveyed said they spend four hours a week dealing with payment issues.
These studies use different samples and measure different categories of work, so their figures shouldn't be combined into a single estimate. Together, though, they point at the same thing: a meaningful share of business time still goes to administrative work that sits around the core product or service.
The early movers are pulling ahead
In Ireland, a 2025 Small Firms Association survey conducted by Amárach found that nine in ten small firms were already using AI for at least one business process. The most common use was automating simple tasks, cited by 66% of respondents, followed by data analytics and reporting at 44%. The main barriers cited by the rest were lack of technical expertise, time pressure and no clear strategy for adoption.
U.S. data show similar momentum. The U.S. Chamber reported that 58% of small businesses used generative AI in 2025, up from 40% in 2024 and 23% in 2023. QuickBooks found businesses using AI were applying it not just to marketing, but to administrative tasks, data processing and bookkeeping as well.
There's more runway than most businesses realize
In November 2025, the McKinsey Global Institute estimated that technologies already available today could technically automate activities accounting for about 57% of current U.S. work hours. McKinsey is careful about what that number means: it measures technical potential at the level of work activities, not how many jobs are expected to disappear, and actual adoption could take years.
That distinction has been consistent in McKinsey's research. Its 2017 report found that fewer than 5% of occupations could be fully automated with the technology available at the time, while about 60% of occupations had at least 30% of their activities that were technically automatable. For a small business, the practical takeaway is that the pool of automatable work, things like entering the same information twice, reconciling records, routing a request or preparing a recurring report, is larger than the relatively narrow set of processes most businesses currently automate.
Connecting what you have is the next advantage
Software changes where work happens. Integration and automation change whether that work needs to happen at all. An invoice can be created digitally and still require someone to copy its details elsewhere, or it can be connected once and never touched by hand again. A CRM can hold customer records while follow-ups are still triggered from memory, or it can trigger them automatically.
Growth adds activity. If every additional customer or transaction also adds another manual update or reconciliation step, the operating workload grows right along with the business. The current data show both sides of that: more people applying to start businesses, existing businesses running on more technology, and manual administration still a measurable part of running them.
That points to where the next phase of small-business technology is heading: less about acquiring new software, and more about what happens between the systems already in place.
Sources
- U.S. Census Bureau. Business Formation Statistics (July 2026).
- U.S. Chamber of Commerce. Empowering Small Business: The Impact of Technology on U.S. Small Business (2025).
- Intuit QuickBooks. Business Solutions Survey (2024); Small Business Insights (April 2025).
- Salesforce. Small & Medium Business Trends Report, 6th Edition.
- NerdWallet UK. Business Owner Time and Money Survey (2025).
- Sage. Hidden Admin Burden Research (2025).
- Small Firms Association / Amárach. Small Business & AI Survey (2025).
- McKinsey Global Institute. Agents, Robots, and Us: Skill Partnerships in the Age of AI (November 2025); A Future That Works (2017).