AI, The Tech Sector, and Small Business: A Grim Outlook for 2026

It has been a difficult start to the year–and it has been an exceptional series of circumstances which have led me to write this blog post.

There is a lot that goes on behind the scenes for any business or self-employed creative that utilizes any significant amount of tech: both the specificity and capability of the technology itself and the management of that technology. You have your pro-grade laptop, your high-powered desktop workstation, specialized monitors capable of rendering graphics to industry-standard color profiles, high-speed and high-volume storage media, peripherals: card readers, customizable keypads, teleconferencing equipment… the list grows ever longer.

I, like many other solopreneur photographers, manage all of these elements myself. I have done so the entirety of my 13+ year career. I’ve designed and built every editing workstation I’ve used, carefully selected industry-grade monitors and peripherals. I’ve maintained my own data archive, preserving client media a decade back–now totaling a whopping 24 terabytes of storage space, housing millions of images. I’ve hand-selected and managed my software–industry standard programs like Adobe Lightroom, and open source gems like Gimp, Darktable, and Libre Office.

Never, in over a decade, have I encountered problems in the tech industry quite like the ones I’ve been faced with the past six months.

Components and the Impact of AI

I have made a point of discussing it here on my website, but I do not make use of generative AI–for a number of reasons. As a creative content producer who has poured hundreds of thousands of hours of effort into honing my craft, I neither approve of the staggering copyright theft upon which every LLM is built, nor do I find the results of that copyright theft particularly compelling. From a business angle, I am reluctant to become reliant upon a technology so rife with legal ambiguity, and that’s to say nothing of the environmental and infrastructural impact AI is having more broadly.

What I did not anticipate in all this was the impact of AI on the components market.

In all the years I have been building and modifying my own desktop workstations, I can safely say I have never had the value of any single computer component exceed its purchase price in the months and years after its installation: and yet that is the world I now find myself in. What started as a GPU shortage at the start of the crypto-boom has, with the evolution of AI, become a larger shortage of computer components generally. Secondhand parts are becoming a rare and expensive commodity as new components disappear in days–if they are listed for sale at all.

For the first time in its history, Western Digital has announced it is sold out of hard drives for the entirety of 2026 –before Q2 has even begun.
I (and I’m sure many other photographers) had plans to upgrade my drives this year, to improve data speeds and quicken my workflow. No dice for me–the drives I’d been looking at have quadrupled in price in the span of six months, with no end to their price rise in sight. Experts believe other categories of electronic components will follow this trend of shortage and price hike–so it doesn’t look like there will be an opportunity for me to upgrade my GPU or CPU either, which puts me in a tight spot for competing with the short turnaround times of larger VC funded photography-mills who promise the moon and deliver a moon rock (after they’ve taken your money, of course).

Aside from the simple inhibitory quality of a deteriorating consumer and prosumer electronics market, it instills a good deal of fear in the hearts of network technicians everywhere, because it begs an important question: what do I do if a part fails? For a small business like mine, it’s a particularly tense proposition, as it changes the calculus surrounding already tight budgetary constraints. Do you raise prices to accommodate the need for a larger emergency fund? Do you turn to cloud-based services to manage your data, leaving yourself vulnerable to subscription fluctuations and the unreliability of an overpriced internet connection provided by one of the major monopolies notorious for unexpected outages? Do you pay an arm and a leg for a prebuilt computer by a major manufacturer instead of building a machine customized to your processing needs for half the price?

But this is all about components. If it was just about components, perhaps the struggle wouldn’t be quite so severe. But it’s never just about any one thing, is it?

Windows 11 and the End of Ownership

It has been a pattern for a decade or more among major software manufacturers to build into the software itself a critical user dependency of some sort. For instance, Lightroom has transitioned to a subscription only model–and one that entraps you into obscene terms of service to even use what you’re paying for. Privacy? A thing of the past. Adobe now has the right to browse through the content in your cloud at will. Compensation for the stolen material being taken from your cloud and fed to Adobe’s LLM? Don’t make me laugh–it’s on their servers, they own it. Obviously. Refuse the terms and you’re out a piece of industry-standard software.

Good luck.

But it isn’t just programs. With the release of Windows 11 in 2021, Microsoft discontinued security updates for Windows 10 in October of 2025, pushing many users onto the Windows 11 platform–some by choice, others by force. I was one of many people who woke up one day to find their operating system had had a sudden makeover in the middle of the night, despite adamantly refusing the persistent pop-up’s for months which insisted I make the switch. I kept choosing not to for good reason.

To put it bluntly: Windows 11 is an astonishing piece of junk. Windows operating systems have always been a bit buggy and quirky in the first year of release, with updates and fixes and design changes being rolled out as user feedback rolls in; but by the time my computer was hijacked into making the switch, Windows 11 had been out for four years–and was still garbage. I regularly experience the juddering and freezing of file explorer windows. Icons mysteriously change size or disappear all together. It runs slow, slow, slow. Programs freeze, dual monitor support randomly fails, or the entire system simply crashes for… some reason. Maybe it knows why, but it’s not telling me.

I never had any of these problems with Windows 10, and despite my troubleshooting, I can find no reasons for why they’re occurring with Windows 11 (aside from poor programming). And let me tell you–these are not the kinds of problems you can afford to keep having when you’re running a business.

But those are the functional complaints–I haven’t even gotten to the privacy and security issues.

Microsoft, like many of the major tech companies deeply invested in AI, has provided with its operating system an AI companion: Copilot. As you probably guessed, there are some deeply serious problems with copilot and its integration into the operating system. One of the biggest: it takes screenshots at random and sends them back to Microsoft–without your awareness or permission. No redactions, no exceptions. Whether you have your bank account open in your browser or sensitive identity documents pulled up–it’s snapping away. You can turn it off. Sort of. Windows tries its hardest to turn it back on with every update–which you don’t have full control over installing. Keeping it turned off is a bit like batting away a handsy drunk: frustrating, dispiriting, and infinitely irritating.

At the end of the day, the message is clear: Your computer isn’t really yours anymore.

As a business this is obviously a big problem, and a big concern for numerous reasons. Constantly managing the setting of my computer system as it fights my privacy preferences is a tedious time sink–time I could be spending marketing or editing or answering client emails. It adds stress, it adds yet more things to worry about. And most obviously: it puts my clients at risk.

AI has become notorious for its bizarre logic failures: six-fingered people, glue added to a pizza sauce recipe (It’s the best part, don’t you know). Open AI itself admits in a recent study that AI hallucinations are mathematically inevitable, not just engineering failures–and that the degree of occurrence is an alarming 20%, with some more advanced reasoning models hallucinating up to 48% of the time. At best, that is a 20% risk that each AI managed feature in my operating system will fail–will do something it shouldn’t, that I will have to take time out of my day to correct.

And that brings me to…

AI Coding and the Deterioration of Software Design

Coming back around to the failure in function of Windows 11: This is becoming an exceedingly common problem across a lot of software. Google announced recently that over 25% of its code is created by AI - a trend among large companies like Google and Microsoft. But with the rise of AI and vibe coding, errors are mounting, problem code is being missed, and many “coders” aren’t bothering to double-check AI work at all (no matter how CEO’s insist otherwise)–leaving it all in the hands of LLM’s with a 20%+ hallucination rate.
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As a result, across the board application and software functionality is deteriorating. Programs are running slower, running less efficiently, crashing more often. Have you noticed websites loading sluggishly? Input lag where there used to be none? Strange glitches? Now you know who (and what) to thank.

Moving Forward

I don’t necessarily have an answer. These are unprecedented challenges at a time when small businesses like mine are already facing countless other unprecedented challenges–from a deteriorating economic outlook to debilitating tariffs to rapidly changing laws and regulations.

I’m making the changes that are within my power to make, beginning a slow switch from big-name software to time-tested and reliable open source alternatives coded by actual humans (while also stockpiling computer components when and where I can find them at affordable prices). I’m forcing myself to construct and learn an entirely new workflow while trying to balance existing obligations and client expectations. It will probably take the rest of the year to complete the transition.

To say it has not been easy would be putting it very lightly.

I suppose the purpose of this blog post has been simply to convey these challenges. I work in a specialized field, and even among photographers I take a more hands-on and in-depth approach than many. I doubt many of my clients are aware of any of this, let alone its impact on a business like mine.

I can confidently say that, despite these challenges, Kirstin Bimson Photography isn’t going anywhere; but I do foresee that the growth I’d hoped to make this year may not happen as planned (if at all). Maintaining a certain degree of flexibility and adaptability has been a cornerstone of my business since its inception, and it has served me well through difficult economic times; but never have I had to flex those muscles quite like I have been this year.

To all of my regulars, to the clients who have been patient and who have taken the time out of their busy lives to check in with me when emails or text messages disappear into the ether: thank you. Thank you for working with me through this period of acclimation and transition, for giving me the room to give your photo shoot and photographs my full attention while maintaining some semblance of a work-life balance.

I can only hope that 2027 will bring better tidings.