SMB popularity is on the rise, and more vendors are suddenly starting to take notice of their customer platform results.
Traditionally, smaller-sized enterprises were not favored amongst vendor giants, as retaining and service costs often exceeded the generated revenue.
This could lead to reducing or eliminating support, and similarly with vendors like Avaya, this has resulted in SMBs with fewer than 200 seats being asked to cancel their subscription after being unable to meet threshold expectation.
And with a low revenue churn and differing support demands, SMBs prove difficult to fit within a one-size-fits-all category and eventually begin to fall further behind. Despite this, the popularity of SMBs amongst vendor giants has grown in recent months, with more large-scale companies showing interest in the market.
Recently, Zendesk and Microsoft had expanded their partnership strategy to offer SMB targeted tools to improve employee productivity, increasing their support for all customer enterprises to deliver quality experiences.
Furthermore, Zoom announced its decision to support small businesses with their internal and external interactions.
But where is this sudden market interest coming from?
In a LinkedIn survey conducted in December, the site saw a 69% year-over-year increase in US LinkedIn members adding ‘founder’ to their profiles, with a number of users now in a more comfortable position to begin businesses than ever before.
This company increase has likely been a result of over 50% of small business leaders stating they were optimistic about heading into 2026, suggesting a rise in economic confidence as more SMBs survive past the early foundational stages.
Ora Levit, VP of Product Management at LinkedIn, highlighted how SMBs are now being given a chance to succeed in their fields thanks to the opportunities and tools available to them.
“Our research shows that small business leaders are thriving despite economic challenges by blending new technology that allows them to accomplish more than ever before, with a strong network that helps unlock opportunities.”
In addition, the rise of AI and increase in affordability means that SMBs are now able to dominate the market stronger than ever before, and vendor giants are starting to notice.
AI-Driven Economic Viability
The survey determined that one of the driving factors for this increase in SMB confidence was the rise of AI, with 54% of small business leaders agreeing that it was essential for business growth, allowing smaller brands to level with large vendors in CX competition.
Artificial tools have allowed smaller enterprises to make themselves known within the CX space without having to spend large amounts for more seats and equipment.
AI automation has fundamentally changed the cost structure of serving SMBs, replacing expensive services with intelligent systems that make the segment profitable for the first time.
Previously, these models made SMBs impractical for CX adoption, experiencing limiting abilities to adopt at scale and keep up with growth demand.
And as smaller enterprises attempted to make their way into the market, established vendors had looked to extend these models to the enterprises without risking redesign, but often still remained too complex and expensive to adopt.
In conversation with CX Today, Micah Margolis, Transformationist at Alacrity Partners, argued that SMBs are not purposefully being left out:
“It is not necessarily that vendors are abandoning SMBs by choice. Think of it more as a reaction to broken economics models that were built for the scale of enterprises but have been awkwardly pushed downstream.”
However, today, platforms are being designed with SMBs in mind, delivering faster deployment, onboarding, and optimization without the excessive manual work attached to it.
“The newer CX platforms are AI-native (or even AI-forward) and they flip the equation: services are replaced by automation, workflows are replaced by agentic AI, value delivery is expected in days rather than quarters.
“In other words, SMBs are viable again, but only for those vendors willing to pivot and rebuild their models rather than just repackaging enterprise tools.
“AI is here now and it is the first thing I have seen that makes service SMBs profitable rather than painful.”
The Builder Mindset and Future Disruptor Potential
SMBs are being increasingly noticed as a source for future vendor growth and innovation, becoming more attractive in the industry for partnerships due to their willingness to adopt and experiment with new tools and strategies.
This is known as a ‘builder mindset’. With limited resources at hand to many smaller enterprises, this requires an attitude reframe to view technology as a growth enabler rather than a cost center.
Prioritizing tool testing and experimenting from customer feedback allows SMBs to speed up deployment and quickly revamp customer experiences, reducing friction in automation and AI investments and increasing its overall capacity.
This technique allows SMBs to present themselves as strategically valuable to vendors who share this vision for growth. This outlook also reframes them not as a market segment to serve, but as innovation partners who are driving the industry forward.
In conversation with CX Today, Jake Kanter, Vice President, EMEA Communications at Twilio, highlighted how Twilio utilizes this mindset as part of its ongoing strategy to achieve transformational change.
“Small and medium-sized businesses share the builder mindset that defines Twilio, and it is a big part of our strategy,” he said.
“Without the scale and infrastructure of large enterprises, SMBs succeed through creativity, agility, and relentless innovation – qualities that align perfectly with our own DNA.”
This mindset places SMBs in a better position than many large enterprises to pursue transformational change, making them a valuable market to work with.
“This represents enormous untapped potential. The next industry disruptor could very well start as a small business, which is why focusing exclusively on enterprises would be a missed opportunity.
“While established organisations often grow incrementally and steadily, SMBs offer vast opportunities for transformation and breakthrough innovation, making this an exciting customer category for us to support.”
Widening Availability of Enterprise Technology
More recently, businesses of all sizes have been able to access advanced tools and capabilities which were once considered too difficult for SMBs to adopt at scale.
Traditionally, this would have required larger budgets with specialized teams, reducing enterprise audiences to large companies. But, the increase in affordability has allowed SMBs to level the competitive playing field, as complexity, knowledge, automation, and cloud delivery became more accessible to enterprises.
This has also include SMB-focused pricing models, allowing enterprises to pay through usage based or outcome based structures that align better to the economic needs of an SMB.
In fact, 76% of US marketer respondents agreed that AI has help smaller brands compete with larger ones, highlighting that competitive advantages are no longer determined by the size of an enterprise.
Speaking to CX Today, Matt Price, CEO of Crescendo, explained how this new method removes long-standing traditional barriers that prevented SMBs from advancing in CX technology.
He said: “Their approach allows even SMBs to harness the power of human-in-the-loop AI, and their outcome-based pricing model makes it affordable for companies of all sizes.
“This is a democratization of AI for enterprises and SMBs alike – something that is rarely seen in the CX space.”
“Crescendo believes that in the era of AI, all boats should rise, and that has encouraged the team to democratize its technology to allow companies of all sizes to provide better services.”
Rapid Innovation and Feedback Loops
Firstly, despite seeing adoption struggle with larger enterprise-targeted capabilities, SMBs are more likely too see faster CX platform deployments with shorter onboarding cycles.
This is due in part to their likelihood of having fewer decision structures and approval layers, allowing real world usage to take effect faster than larger enterprises.
Secondly, vendors that choose to work only with well-established enterprises are likely to miss potential growth from customers that have already reached successes.
With SMBs, vendors are able to support smaller groups to achieve this growth, increasing its customer enterprise base by driving strong loyalty results and expanded revenue over time.
And as SMBs adopt new technologies faster than enterprises and provide more candid feedback, these make them the ideal partners for vendors when developing next-generation solutions.
Karina Tymchenko, Founder at Brandualist, suggested that SMBs are becoming more attractive to vendors after now noticing their simpler decision structures and fewer approval layers.
“I have seen from my experience working at Brandualist, that SMBs are able to adopt new platforms and technologies faster than larger enterprises and provide much more candid feedback as a result.”
“SMBs require less complicated pricing structures and quicker onboarding processes to begin using your product or service.”
Furthermore, smaller enterprises are more likely to stay with a vendor if they feel supported during their growth.
This builds long-term loyalty between enterprise and vendor, as enterprises continue to spend with the vendor, the vendor will deploy further SMB-focused capabilities to advance its growth rate.
“Those vendors who choose to focus on this segment will earn long-term loyalty from their customers, as SMBs very rarely switch vendors if they feel they are being supported.”
“Those vendors choosing to walk away are betting on higher priced clients; however, they are missing out on tremendous growth opportunities that exist with businesses that can rapidly scale when provided with the correct Customer Experience (CX) platform.”
Community-Driven Trust and Authenticity
As a result of increased SMB loyalty, these vendors are more likely to receive a larger enterprise endorsement, with smaller businesses being more likely to take advice from enterprises at similar stages for vendor recommendations, increasing their overall customer base.
Typically, SMBs will make purchasing decisions based on peer recommendations and real-world experiences rather than following generalized marketing hype, creating more opportunities for authentic vendor engagement.
Justin Ong, Director of Brand and Community at Auvik, spoke to CX Today about the fact that smaller organizations are more likely to take advice from similar practitioners who have genuinely benefited from the product, highlighting that proof comes from real outcomes and shared experiences.
He said: “In the SMB world, IT pros don’t buy because of buzzwords. They buy because another real human said, ‘This works.’
“Word-of-mouth and personal experience guide nearly every purchasing decision, which is why we invest so deeply in community spaces where those honest conversations happen.
“Whether it’s Spiceworks, LinkedIn, Reddit, or Facebook, our goal is to show up, contribute, and stay connected to the people who trust each other long before they trust a brand.”
GenAI-Powered Innovation Wave
CX and financial platforms are being increasingly designed around SMB requirements, as expectations begin to rise for vendors to create SMB targeted products rather than simply adapting tool.
Today, generative AI is creating system-level changes that allow SMBs to access more innovative, self-serve solutions specific to their needs and constraints.
Furthermore, GenAI can automate support for configuration, content creation, decisions, and customer interactions, allowing vendors to deliver ready to use solutions that scales targeted support efficiently for smaller enterprises.
MJ Jiang, Chief Revenue Officer at Credibly, emphasized how SMBs need access to simpler products with self serving solutions.
“Product market fit for SMBs tend to be products that are mostly self-serve, because of margin pressures for smaller business owners who are mostly just running their own day-to-day,” she explained.
“The focus is often on out-of-the-box suites that can be used right away, with little bespoke engineering or customization, and low transaction cost, but scalable customer support.”
Despite fewer accessible products, Jiang notes that current solutions are utilizing generative AI to build SMB-specific capabilities, highlighting them as a growing and active market.
“Given this trend, SMBs might have fewer options but also might have more innovative solutions that target them through the rise of GenAI.
“Companies should remember that SMBs are a growing segment and undergoing a lot of innovation, especially with the rise of GenAI – which can produce system-level change.
“Primarily, it is because smaller and larger enterprises have fundamentally different needs and requirements for solutions that diverge more over time, pretty much in any industry.”
Friction Removal Over Feature Selling
The vendor approach to SMB has shifted in the recent months of its market increase, with more smaller businesses looking more valuable when driving operational impact than before.
However, vendors have traditionally avoided SMBs due to popular opinions that these enterprises were economically unattractive.
Despite this, the SMB market should be measured by operational efficiency gains rather than seat licenses, with vendors shifting the perspective to focus on enterprises who are more likely going to create real business value by solving real workflow problems through unified platforms.
In a discussion with CX Today, Jason Uslan, Chief Commercial Officer at Wildix, distinguishes SMBs from this traditional outlook, arguing that these enterprises are now driving valuable innovation in CX and UCaaS.
“SMB and mid-market organizations are no longer the ‘smaller end’ of CX and UCaaS; they are where the category is being rewritten,” he said.
“The vendors doubling down have made a different calculation: they recognize that digital democratization, AI automation and platform cohesion can unlock real business value in SMB, but only if you construct solutions around how these organizations actually operate.”
Uslan further argues that SMBs will eventually be valued in CX solutions by their results in efficiency and driving customer experiences, rather than the overall size of a company.
“In 2026, success in SMB CX won’t be measured by seats sold but by minutes of friction removed from every customer interaction. That’s where the growth is,” he emphasized.
“The business value proposition is clear: vendors who can deliver rapid, outcome-focused deployment through a partner ecosystem will capture the 90% of SMBs still underserved by current solutions. Those still optimized for enterprise complexity will find this segment structurally unprofitable and continue to retreat.”
