Gil Oved’s argument is that a business does not need to build technology to be a technology business, because technology is already how it sells, how it stays in contact with customers and how it runs efficiently. The practical version for a small business owner is narrower and more useful: the question is not which technologies to adopt but which of your costs and frictions a tool removes.
Oved built and sold one of South Africa’s largest advertising agencies and has since spent his time assessing early-stage businesses, which is a useful vantage point for separating what changes an industry from what merely gets discussed.
Start from your own bottleneck, not from a trend list
Owners who adopt technology because a list says it matters end up with tools nobody uses. Owners who start from the step that costs them most time or money find the tool that fixes it, and it is often unremarkable. Scheduling, stock visibility, quoting, invoicing and payment collection are where most small businesses have the largest recoverable losses.
Being reachable is now part of the product
Customers judge a business partly on how easily they can find it, ask it something and get an answer. For most small operators that means a working listing, a monitored channel and a person who replies, not a custom application. The gap between businesses on this is large and it is inexpensive to close.
Automation reaches the physical trades too
The forecast that robotics moves from factories into homes and service settings has partly happened in cleaning, security, monitoring and maintenance. Owners in service industries should watch whether the equipment they hire people to operate is becoming cheap enough to change the job, because that shifts the business from selling labour to selling supervision and outcomes.
Technology moves the cost floor for everyone, including your competitors
When a tool becomes cheap and widely available, the savings it produces get competed away into prices and the advantage disappears. The durable position is what the tool lets you do that others are not doing, not the tool itself. Research on where technology adoption actually raises productivity, such as the work published by the Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, is more useful here than vendor material.
Adopt on a timeline you can afford
The businesses that suffer are those that commit heavily to a technology early, and those that refuse until customers have already left. The workable middle is to adopt when the cost has fallen and the use case is proven in your own sector, which is usually later than enthusiasts claim and earlier than sceptics believe.
Frequently asked questions
Does every business really need to think of itself as a tech business?
In the sense that technology determines how it sells, communicates and operates, yes. It does not mean building software.
How should a small business choose what to adopt?
By starting from its own biggest cost or friction rather than from a trend list, which usually points at scheduling, stock, quoting, invoicing or collections.
What is the cheapest improvement most small businesses can make?
Being easy to find, easy to ask a question, and reliably answered, which requires a monitored channel rather than custom software.
Why does a widely adopted tool stop being an advantage?
Because the savings get competed away into prices once everyone has it, leaving only what you do with it as the differentiator.
When is the right time to adopt a new technology?
Once the cost has fallen and the use case is proven in your own sector, which is usually later than advocates claim and earlier than sceptics accept.
Further reading
Originally published in February 2017. Updated September 2026 to turn a trend list into a method for deciding what a small business should actually adopt.
