The World Has Changed. Are You Ready for It?
How software is built, how systems are bought and how operations are run have all shifted. Here is what it means for Indian SMBs.
Something happened that every business leader should know about.
Curative is a US health insurance company that grew from about 7 to 7,000 employees in nine months during the pandemic and generated around $5 billion in revenue from COVID testing. At its peak it ran 206,000 tests in a single day. Its CEO, Fred Turner, recently told the 20VC podcast that the company had cancelled its Salesforce contract, worth about $600,000 a year, because no one was really using it any more.1
In its place, the team built its own CRM using AI-assisted "vibe coding" in about two months. According to Turner, it works better and fits more closely with how the company actually operates. The $600,000 annual bill went to zero.1,2
This was not a small startup experiment. When a company of that size and operational complexity says it built a better CRM in weeks using AI, that is a signal worth paying close attention to.
The same company's AI agents now handle provider contract negotiations at roughly $70 per contract, against $1,500 to $2,000 when handled by human teams. Credentialing that used to take two to three months now takes about 12 hours, at around 20 cents per provider.1
The question is not whether this is happening. It is. The question is what it means for your business, and whether you are positioned to benefit from it.
Here is exactly what has changed.
The economics of technology have changed. What cost crores to build a few years ago can now be built in weeks. Work that needed teams of people can increasingly be handled by AI agents. That creates a genuine strategic opportunity for the businesses that understand it.
The real opportunity for Indian businesses.
Indian SMBs and MSMEs are well placed to benefit from this shift. The companies making the most of these capabilities are not necessarily the largest; they are the most agile. A ₹100 crore manufacturer that makes the right technology decisions can compete with much larger players that are still locked into expensive, generic systems.
This is not about chasing the latest technology for its own sake. It is about asking a sharper set of questions about every technology investment the business makes. Without a senior technology leader, a few patterns show up again and again:
- Licences for systems used at a fraction of their capacity. The gap is not the software; it is that no one is asking whether the business should be using it at all, or whether something built to fit would cost far less.
- Months lost waiting for traditional vendors to deliver. By the time the system arrives, the business has moved on, and you pay ongoing maintenance for yesterday's solution.
- Systems that fall behind growth. Revenue, team and complexity grow; systems do not keep pace. That gap becomes the ceiling on the next stage of growth.
Six questions worth sitting with
- Do you have a single, real-time view of your business across all locations and business lines?
- When did you last review whether your software licences deliver value in proportion to their cost?
- Which repetitive, high-volume tasks could an AI agent handle today, and is anyone looking at that?
- Do you have a technology roadmap for the next 18 months that your leadership team has agreed?
- If a key operational person left tomorrow, how much knowledge would walk out with them?
- Are you making build-versus-buy decisions using today's economics, or the assumptions of five years ago?
The DRIVE Framework.
Every CXOxsys engagement follows a structured method for turning technology decisions into measurable business outcomes.
A structured assessment of your technology stack, system gaps, process inefficiencies and hidden costs, built around your business, sector and stage.
An 18 to 24 month roadmap aligned to your business plan. Every major system decision framed as build versus buy, prioritised by return, impact and risk.
Vendor selection, negotiation, implementation oversight and governance, until the system is live and your team is using it.
Every recommendation measured against the original diagnostic, with KPIs set before implementation and reviewed after.
AI capabilities change monthly. The roadmap keeps adapting so the business is not caught behind the curve again.
DRIVE in action
For a 250-person marketing services company scaling nationally, the diagnostic identified ₹38 lakh in annual software savings, mapped 475 requirements across 32 business modules and produced a full enterprise architecture. The company then selected a single integrated platform to replace a fragmented multi-tool stack.
Want to talk about what this means for your business? Book a free 30-minute call with a CXOxsys fractional CTO.