SMB Application Adoption Plans

What kinds of applications will small and midsized businesses (SMBs) adopt in the next 12 months? Are these investments upgrades/replacements or are they a new category for the buyer? To find out, we recently surveyed 500 U.S. SMB principals.

Adoption plans vary quite a bit by headcount. Very small businesses (VSBs, with 1-19 employees) are most likely to adopt or upgrade GenAI in the next 12 months, followed by an office productivity suite such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365, and an email marketing application such as Mailchimp or Constant Contact.

Like VSBs, small businesses (SBs, with 20-99 employees) have GenAI at the top of their list. However, they are next most likely to adopt or upgrade a payroll/benefits administration application, followed by email marketing.

Midsized businesses (MBs, with 100-500 employees) have a very different shopping list. Cybersecurity applications are at the top of that list, reflecting their ongoing focus on data security. After that, they plan to adopt or upgrade GenAI, followed by inventory management.

SMB 12-Month Application Adoption Plans

Like tech purchases, most application adoption in the next 12 months will be implemented as upgrades to or replacements of existing technology, as opposed to a kind of application that the company hasn’t used before. For VSBs, the categories with the highest planned investment in new-to-the-company technology are GenAI and non-website analytics, where each category will be new for 50% of adopters. For SBs, inventory management will have the highest share of new adopters; for MBs, email marketing.

SMB Application Adoption Status

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