The pace of technological change and innovation in recent years is widely understood to be unprecedented. Most of us have an instinctive sense of how these advancements are impacting our lives and lifestyles, as well as a growing share of everyday enterprise operations.
What is perhaps a little less obvious is how developments being led by the ‘big tech’ behemoths are reshaping entire economies and fundamentally remaking the modern world, a shift that, as Oleg Boiko, founder and principal investor of Finstar Financial Group with more than $2bn under management, notes, is changing the balance between large technology platforms and the rest of the economy.
All of which begs the question perhaps, should we be worried by big tech’s growing dominance? Well, opinions on that will no doubt vary depending on your particular perspective but it certainly seems like a timely moment to take a closer look at some of the key consideration points.
The Big Tech Explosion
Big tech giants—the likes of Nvidia, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google—continue to swallow up huge chunks of the global economy and consolidate their positions at the forefront of even the newest and most rapidly evolving value chains.
In fact, according to UNCTAD, the United Nations’ trade and development body, seven of the 10 most valuable companies in the world are now digital tech businesses. That might not be surprising at first glance—the same companies have been enormously valuable for many years now, after all. But further context reveals more about the trajectory that the world’s economy is currently taking, with figures showing that the five largest big techs more than doubled their collective share of both sales and assets globally between 2017 and 2025.
Furthermore, those companies are also now very rapidly growing their collective presence and their domination across “the entire digital economy,” as UNCTAD puts it, “from cloud computing and e-commerce to artificial intelligence and advertising”.
What About the Little Guy?
The growing concentration of economic and enterprise activity to the realms owned and operated wholly by the biggest of tech titans raises profound questions for the rest of us, for IT leaders, specifically, and for all non-giant tech businesses. However, it poses significant challenges as well to entire societies and to public policy makers the world over, as Oleg Boiko explores in a considered blog posted recently on the FinExtra website.
Oleg Boiko describes the dynamics in evidence as being about “Big Tech Against the Little Guy”, which he suggests will in time establish “a new social reality”, the characteristics of which are currently being defined while still not yet truly being reckoned with for the most part by stakeholders across society. It’s a compelling and convincing framing that illuminates the idea that contemporary social structures, labour markets and entire industries are already firmly in a state of existential flux.
Transformational Trends
Endless economic headwinds, inflationary pressures and demands for ‘green’ transitions all remain highly influential drivers of behavioural transitions worldwide but the shift towards AI and automation is another macrotrend now routinely cited as an instigator of radical change on a global scale. The World Economic Forum, for example, reported last year that around 40 per cent of all businesses anticipate reducing the scale of their workforces by 2030 if AI allows them to do so.
Upskilling existing teams to deploy AI and other forms of evolving tech in the smartest and most impactful ways possible is well established as an operational priority for enterprises everywhere, and across industries. However, while it might boost productivity and revenues, the introduction of AI into workplaces is also likely to curtail the job prospects of potentially millions of people worldwide and permanently eliminate certain types of employment.
According to McKinsey, roughly 30 per cent of all hours currently being worked by enterprise employees will be automated with the help of generative AI by 2030. From his perspective, Oleg Boiko has warned that widespread automation and the resulting reduced activity among specific cohorts within modern societies will soon represent a major philosophical and practical headache for public policy makers, particularly in advanced economies.
Shifting Dynamics
Of course, we know that tech-driven changes are already shifting dynamics within labour markets worldwide. Strikingly, recent analysis of relevant data by Revelio Labs, as reported in the Washington Post, puts the average age of new hires in the US across 2025 at 42 years, with younger generations finding it increasingly tough to land entry level roles and to get a foothold on their intended career paths. Again, this phenomenon cuts across industry sectors and is by no means unique to the US.
Companies understand acutely the need to upskill their existing workforces but for younger generations the challenge of finding any form of employment is increasingly becoming an insurmountable one. Oleg Boiko has highlighted that these dynamics could create serious long-term problems for modern societies if growing numbers of people are deprived of opportunities to work and to contribute meaningfully to economic activity and development.
Options and Opportunities
Looking ahead, there are clearly some deeply interesting and important questions to answer for “the little guys”, which in our current context might be taken to mean every other enterprise there is besides those increasingly dominant tech giants.
For IT leaders, those questions might well include, for example - what should the guiding principles be for our investment decisions? And what should we really be aiming to achieve, in the broadest terms?
You might also wonder whether it is good and healthy, in fact, for the global economy, for future generations and for non-giant enterprises to have so much of the digital world being defined and profited from by so few companies.
Those musings will remain largely rhetorical for most of us, for the time being at least, but one never knows when overarching and seemingly abstract considerations suddenly create fresh and tangible enterprise opportunities in the here and now.
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