Ciarán Quilty, Senior Vice-President for International at Intuit, has penned an op-ed that examines how the ‘Great Tech Fragmentation’ is costing small businesses more than time.
Ten years ago, the great tech promise was digital freedom: Choose your tech stack, move faster, scale smarter.
But that freedom came with a cost. Instead of thriving, today, many small and mid-sized businesses are drowning in digital tools.
The last decade saw an explosion of point solutions designed to solve specific problems. One for invoices, another for CRM, something for cash flow and yet another for lead generation. Each delivered value on its own but together, they created a maze that most business owners are now stuck inside.
We’ve confused customisation with clarity. The modern SMB tech stack might look impressive from a distance with intelligent workflows, smart dashboards and integrated systems but the experience is different.
For many, it’s a daily routine of switching between tabs, cross-checking reports, managing notifications, and stitching together a rough picture of what’s happening inside their business.
According to Intuit’s own research, some mid-market businesses are managing up to 25 tools just to operate. This begs the question of whether this is business transformation or simply more overhead?
More tools, more decisions, less progress
Every additional platform promises simplicity. But in aggregate, they ask for more onboarding, maintenance and thinking.
The result is fragmentation of both the systems and user attention. This comes with operational cost and strategic risk because when leaders are pulled between dashboards, they can’t move faster. Decisions stall, energy drops and what looks like productivity is simply digitised pen pushing.
The danger isn’t tool overload itself but what happens when no one has the time or headspace to think clearly. To be clear: this isn’t a call to consolidate software for the sake of neatness. Integration alone doesn’t solve the real problem.
What businesses need is systems that connect by sharing data and interpreting it, and with dashboards that require fewer reasons to check them.
What they’re asking for is coherence, which is not the same as compatibility. The coherent system is one that reflects the way a business actually works rather than the way a product team wishes it did.
Automation that engenders trust
We often frame these problems in terms of time: From the hours lost to reconciling data, toggling between platforms or re-entering the same details into five places.
But the real loss is confidence because when everything feels disconnected, leaders stop trusting what they see and start second-guessing the data. They hesitate on decisions they used to make quickly and as a result growth slows. This is not due to a lack of opportunity, but because there’s basically no clarity.
We can count the hours lost but there are deeper consequences that don’t show up in the bottom line, at least not right away. Momentum erodes, high-value decisions get delayed, teams remain stuck in low-priority work and business leaders spend more time managing systems instead of leading their business.
As much as these feel like technical problems, they are human, and deserve human-first solutions. By this, we mean automation that is enabled by AI agents acting less as standalone tools and more a connected system that behaves like a team.
The result? A finance agent reconciles your books and flags anomalies while a customer agent follows up with leads before they go cold. All the while a marketing agent segments and sends campaigns, without being told twice.
What used to be scattered across systems is now surfaced, prioritised, and actioned. No switching or searching, just forward motion within the existing flow of work.
Designing for the way people really work
The modern business has more data than ever. But unless that data flows across systems, it’s stuck.
A lead that shows high intent but never triggers a follow-up is a lost customer. Similarly, a late payer who never gets flagged is a cash flow risk and a strong product with a weak campaign is a missed opportunity.
When systems don’t talk, insight gets trapped and decision-making narrows. Hence, coherence isn’t just about simplifying work but unlocking insight that’s already there, hidden behind fragmented tools.
Too much business software is still built around product categories, CRM, finance, marketing or Ops with each designed in its own lane, with its own logic.
But that’s not how people work. Business leaders don’t jump between buckets. Their day is a blur of context: a payment issue, a lead to chase, a campaign to tweak. Real work cuts across categories and good systems account for that mess. Great systems actually reduce it.
When software mirrors the shape of actual work, whether it’s messy, nonlinear and interdependent, it no longer needs to be one more thing to manage. Instead, the software starts to make space.
That’s the transformation we need. The move from fragmentation toward greater clarity.
