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Posted: Fri 21st Aug 2026
13 min read
Pick up your phone right now and look at the home screen.
Chances are, most of those icons – Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, WhatsApp, Instagram, the browser itself – trace back to one of only a handful of companies. That's not an accident of taste.
Ofcom's Online Nation 2025 report found that UK adults now spend an average of four hours 30 minutes online every day, and that 51% of that time is spent on platforms owned by just two businesses: Google and Meta.
Ninety-nine per cent of UK adults use a Google service every month; 97% use something built by Meta. Before most of us have finished breakfast, we've already touched big tech a dozen times over.
That's the strange thing about the relationship between big tech and small business. Statistically, we've never been closer. Emotionally, it can feel like two different worlds.
We asked our community a simple question: what more could big tech actually do for small businesses?
We expected a handful of replies. Instead, the thread kept growing – specific, generous, and often quietly frustrated.
Founders described unpaid invoices from customers 10 times their size, half a day lost to a support queue that never called back, and a week spent on a competition pitch that vanished into silence.
This isn't a piece about big tech being the enemy. It's an attempt to hold two things that are both true: we are more woven into these platforms than ever, and the people running small businesses on the ground often still feel like an afterthought.
If we're going to close that gap, we first have to be honest about how wide it's got – and then listen, properly, to what would actually narrow it.
The digital sector – of which the household names we think of as "big tech" are only the most visible part – generated £177.2 billion in gross value added in 2024, or 6.8% of the entire UK economy, according to government (ONS) figures.
It grew 3.3% that year, nearly three times faster than the UK economy as a whole.
Google's own 2026 economic impact report for the UK puts the economic activity it supports across the country at £140 billion in 2025, up from £118 billion just two years earlier – a figure the report likens to the entire economy of Greater Manchester.
Of that, £60 billion, or 43%, is attributed to small and medium-sized businesses.
It isn't just a UK story. In the United States, seven technology companies – the so-called "Magnificent Seven" – now account for more than 30% of the entire value of the S&P 500, according to Forbes' June 2026 analysis.
A handful of boardrooms now sit behind a third of the value of corporate America.
So by any measure – time, money, market value – big tech is threaded through almost everything we do, every single day.
Here's the paradox: the more embedded these platforms become, the less small businesses and the public seem to trust them.
Eight years ago, technology was the single most-trusted industry in nine out of every 10 countries the Edelman Trust Barometer surveyed. Today, it's the most-trusted industry in only half of them.
Edelman's 2025 report puts global trust in technology companies "to do what is right" at 61% – a figure the report itself frames as fragile, noting "significant declines" in the US, UK, Australia and Canada.
Trust drops further the closer you get to AI: only 44% of people globally say they're comfortable with businesses using it at all.
In the US, Gallup's most recent confidence survey found only 20% of Americans have a great deal or quite a lot of confidence in big technology companies, compared with 67% who feel that way about small business. That's a 47-point chasm in how much people trust the two ends of the same economy.
And small businesses are living the sharp edge of that tension. The Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council's October 2025 survey found that 91% of small businesses in the US now sell or market across multiple digital channels.
Yet 44% still name data privacy and security as their single biggest concern, and around three in 10 point to a lack of in-house expertise or the pace of change as genuine barriers.
Put simply: we're leaning on these platforms more than ever, and trusting them less, while feeling less equipped to keep pace. That's the backdrop our members were writing into when they answered our question.
Here's what they told us, in their own words.
For manufacturers and product-led businesses especially, the leap from small business tools to enterprise-grade systems happens at exactly the stage when funding and support are hardest to find.
Robyn Payne, co-founder, Sasbery Spirits, says:
"There is an awkward stage in a small business's growth where you're no longer really a start-up, so much of the start-up support and funding is less accessible, but you're not yet sufficiently established or profitable to justify substantial investment in enterprise technology.
"It can feel like being caught in the middle."
Robyn runs a small Surrey distillery, and her ask is straightforward: platforms that let a business scale up on the same underlying system, rather than migrating between spreadsheets, entry-level tools and enterprise software every few years.
"Small businesses aren't necessarily simple businesses," as she puts it, "sometimes we're just complex businesses with very small numbers."
The products themselves aren't always the problem – the onboarding is.
Lewis Lannan, founder, Forge Solution, notes:
"Longer trial periods that give businesses enough time to properly test and implement a product. Better tutorials and documentation designed for non-technical users.
"More accessible tiered pricing for businesses that are still early in their growth and can't yet justify a significant investment... often the jump from free tier to the first paid tier is significant!"
Lewis spends his working life helping other small businesses fix exactly this problem.
His point is also a business case for big tech, not just a favour: a company that adopts software early and grows into higher tiers naturally is a far stickier customer than one priced out before it had a chance to prove the value.
"Sometimes," he says, "the best long-term enterprise customer starts as a very small one."
More content isn't the same as more help – and for a business of one, time is the scarcest resource there is.
Danijelah Rolih, founder of Mind Kind, says:
"I'd LOVE the opportunity to have a one-to-one session with an expert who could look at my business and say: this is what you're doing well, these are the features you're not using, and these are the three or five things that would make the biggest difference to your particular business."
Danijelah runs a micro-business, meaning she is, most days, the whole company.
She described spending half a day trying to solve a single account connection problem using AI tools, forums and email support, without success – the kind of thing a 20-minute conversation with an actual person could likely have solved.
Her ask: not another webinar telling her that SEO or AI matters, but 45 minutes with someone who can tell her what to focus on next.
Working with larger businesses is often framed as the reward for scaling up. It doesn't always feel that way in practice.
Claire Oatway, founder, Oatway Design, warns:
"We've just been hit with a major unpaid invoice and smarting.
"It's come about because we've been trying to scale the business and work with different customers and learnt the hard way that bigger customers aren't necessarily more trustworthy."
Claire's experience cuts against the assumption that scale equals safety. Her suggestion: could big tech extend the same instinct that created the apprenticeship levy to other shared services too, such as credit checking and payment protection, so small businesses aren't carrying all the risk of growth alone.
Even with good data, it's easy to miss what's actually costing a small business its customers.
Michael Bourne, founder, Local Roots Digital, says:
"A business can be doing fine on Google Business Profile, fine on their website, fine on reviews, and still lose the sale, because customers don't judge one channel at a time.
"They piece it together... None of the big tools tells you that, because they only see their own slice."
Michael's challenge to big tech is to think beyond the individual platform: help small businesses understand how their presence looks stitched together across all of them, not just how it performs inside one tool at a time.
Valerie Lothian, founder of Focusivity, says:
"Consider having an in-person or online session where we can meet your partners and find out if they want to do business with us? What real opportunities would they give to us to buy our services or products, where there is a mutual win?"
Valeria's ask is the simplest here, and maybe the most important: a real conversation about mutual business, where a small business is occasionally a supplier or partner to big tech, not only a customer of it.
None of this is a criticism of big tech – it's an invitation, made in good faith by people who use, rely on and often admire the platforms they're describing.
Big tech isn't a distant, abstract force in small business life; it's threaded through nearly every hour of the working day.
Given how close that relationship already is in practice, it shouldn't be this hard to make it feel close in the ways that matter too: pricing and products that meet small businesses where they are, human expertise alongside self-serve tools, shared protection against risk, a joined-up view of the customer, and, every so often, an actual seat at the table.
Enterprise Nation works with big brands every single day, ensuring we're bringing the SMB voice round the table and creating business support programmes and campaigns which make a difference to you, the entrepreneur.
