In July 2022, I made a profession pivot from consulting to educating. Past being intrinsically fascinating and rewarding, I assumed educating would supply a respite after nearly 20 years of day by day hand-to-hand fight with issues, shoppers, and, sometimes, colleagues. Then, in November 2022, OpenAI launched the primary model of ChatGPT. It rapidly turned clear that synthetic intelligence (AI) may radically reshape my new trade, my previous one, and lots of others.
Over the past three years, I’ve been actively experimenting with AI by means of a course I created referred to as “AI and Consultative Resolution Making.” In parallel, I wrote the guide Epic Disruptions, which concerned conducting deep historic analysis into case research of world-changing improvements starting from gunpowder to Pampers disposable diapers.
One of many themes that emerged from my analysis is that disruptive change is predictably unpredictable. There are broad patterns, however as a result of there are people and sophisticated techniques concerned, there are sudden twists and turns in each story.
Because the saying goes, historical past could not repeat, but it surely actually rhymes. There are 5 historic classes that appear pertinent to how AI may—or couldn’t—drive epic disruptive change.
1. Disruption usually begins in sudden locations
Within the Forties, Walter Bradeen, John Brattain, and William Shockley from Bell Labs developed a brand new expertise referred to as the transistor. The intent of their analysis effort was to develop a expertise to exchange vacuum tubes that powered communications networks. The transistor had clear advantages. It was small, rugged, and didn’t give off warmth. Nonetheless, early variations had been additionally unreliable and required rearchitecting techniques.
It took many years for transistors to make it into communications networks. The primary industrial market was listening to aids. The transistor match completely available in the market. Listening to aids had been comparatively easy, making it simple to include transistors. Vacuum tubes gave off warmth, which made battery packs affixed to a belt uncomfortable. Tubes burned out, making the full price of proudly owning a listening to help costly. The transistor-based listening to help market exploded, supporting additional technological growth that in the end ushered within the trendy communications and computing age.
We naturally deal with the event and deployment of AI in giant, subtle markets like america or Western Europe. Nonetheless, one driver of ChatGPT’s speedy development is utilization in rising markets that lack sturdy well being and schooling infrastructures. Shoppers don’t ask, “How does AI examine to a talented trainer or clinician?”; they ask, “Is AI higher than nothing in any respect?” Historical past suggests rigorously analyzing rising market developments to identify disruptive change early.
2. The key sauce of disruption is a singular option to create, seize, and ship worth.
When Mac and Dick McDonald first opened their restaurant, it was unremarkable. The trail to disruption began after they shut the restaurant in 1948 and unveiled the “Speedee Service System” that simplified and standardized meals manufacturing. When Ray Kroc turned in essence the grasp franchisor of the idea in 1954, he and his staff architected a singular system that concerned shut partnership with franchise house owners. Within the Sixties, Heny Sonneborn perfected a mannequin that allowed the McDonald’s Company to revenue by means of actual property. The distinctive means that McDonald’s created, delivered, and captured worth—its enterprise mannequin—allowed it to serve billions profitably.
A singular enterprise mannequin is the key sauce of disruptive innovation. It’s what allowed Amazon.com, Google, and Netflix to emerge as powerhouses three many years in the past. Distinctive enterprise fashions present funding for additional enchancment and frustrate incumbent response.
Proper now, main labs like OpenAI and Anthropic are following enterprise fashions which can be neither novel nor tough for expertise corporations like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google to observe. If the labs don’t develop distinctive methods to create, seize, and ship worth, historical past suggests they’re more likely to have finite lives as standalone suppliers.
3. Disruption is at all times messy within the center.
Within the Nineteen Twenties, a battle broke out for the soul of the streets of many main US cities. Henry Ford had achieved his imaginative and prescient: the automotive for the “nice multitudes.” Perfecting the meeting line introduced the price of Ford’s Mannequin T from $30,000 (in in the present day’s phrases) in 1908 to $5,000. Gross sales soared.
This was good for some, however much less good for others. Cities had been designed for folks, not for vehicles. The sharp enhance in vehicle adoption spurred chaos and carnage. Newspaper cartoons within the Nineteen Twenties usually confirmed the Grim Reaper driving vehicles. One within the St. Louis Star confirmed a person kneeling holding up a platter of youngsters to a automotive with a humanoid maniacal grin. In 1922 the mayor of Baltimore devoted a 25-foot wooden and plaster obelisk as a monument for the 130 kids who died in motor accidents that 12 months.
It’s at all times messy in the midst of disruptive change. Getting out of the automotive’s center required applied sciences corresponding to visitors alerts, laws corresponding to the necessity for drivers to have licenses, and norms, corresponding to right-of-way at intersections.
By means of this lens, a push to reduce guidelines and regulation is misguided because it elongates the time in AI’s messy center and will increase the percentages of hurt. Futurists Bob Johansen and Jamias Cascio observe that it’s exhausting to set exact guidelines in markets rising as rapidly as AI, so counsel the metaphor of a “bounce rope” in a wrestling ring. There are agency ring posts and bounds on the fringe of the ring, however these boundaries have slack and provides in them.
4. There’s usually a twist within the story
When Johannes Gutenberg and his staff sought an early buyer for the printing press, they naturally turned to the Catholic Church. The Church had actual issues to unravel, corresponding to standardizing missals used for church providers and shortening the three years it took at hand scribe a Bible. When Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who went on to grow to be Pope Pius II, noticed a Gutenberg Bible in 1454 he praised their “very neat and legible script” and famous how they might be learn “with out using glasses.”
The Church didn’t foresee what occurred subsequent. The printing presses accelerated the flexibility for folks like Martin Luther to unfold concepts attacking the Church. A 3rd of the books printed in Germany between 1518 and 1525 had been from Luther. The printing press was a boon to some—scientists, revolutionaries, entrepreneurs who constructed companies round it—and a curse to others: scribes, cardinals, and anybody else who profited from ignorance.
Administration consulting corporations have profited handsomely from AI-related work. In early 2024 Boston Consulting Group stated that 20 % of its revenues was AI-related. McKinsey touted the way it was utilizing its custom-created AI answer to spice up its productiveness and speed up growing distinctive affect. What if, nonetheless, shoppers discover ways to use AI in ways in which obviate consultants? Or if AI reliance withered a consulting firm’s means to develop distinctive expertise? May the foremost consulting corporations take a look at AI the identical means the Church regarded on the printing press?
5. It’s all concerning the folks
Singapore’s DBS Financial institution is a exceptional story of transformation (detailed in my 2020 guide Eat, Sleep, Innovate). In 2010, it was a laggard in its native market. In 2025, DBS was well known for its nimbleness and digital prowess.
Its digital transformation concerned key strategic shifts and main investments in expertise. These strikes had been needed, however not enough. The crucial unlock got here from a set of behavioral interventions to assist bankers use applied sciences in new methods. Paul Cobban, who was DBS’s Chief Information and Transformation Officer from 2009-2022 noticed that and not using a systematic and structured method to cultural change, adopting digital applied sciences could be akin to changing memos with emails or emails with Slack messages. One among Cobban’s mantras was, “Nothing modifications except folks’s habits modifications.”
The identical is true of AI. Adoption shouldn’t be a technological downside; it’s a sociological and cultural one. Jim Wilson from Accenture estimates that for each greenback corporations spend on expertise, they need to anticipate to spend six {dollars} on the human aspect of change.
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One recurrent lesson that struck me in the course of the analysis and writing of Epic Disruptions is how historical past supplies a singular option to make sense of an advanced current. Disruption is predictably unpredictable, so AI will certainly break from a few of these patterns. Nonetheless, the previous supplies a information for the place to look and what to search for to make sense of what’s going to occur subsequent.
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