This Isn't Disruption

Everyone keeps calling AI a disruptor. I hear it in meetings. I read it in headlines. I watch analysts on YouTube frame the entire conversation around which industries are about to get "disrupted" and which companies are next. And every time I hear it, something doesn't sit right. Not because the word is wrong, exactly, but because it's too small for what's actually happening.

Disruption has a definition. It has a shape. It's Blockbuster passing on Netflix and then watching their entire business evaporate in less than a decade. It's Kodak inventing the digital camera, burying it, and then filing for bankruptcy while the rest of the world moved on without them. Disruption is what happens when a new technology replaces an old one inside an existing system. The system survives. The incumbent doesn't. We still watch movies. We still take photos. The activity didn't change. The provider did.

And yes, that's happening with AI. I'd be lying if I said it wasn't.

Chegg is the textbook example, no pun intended. Their entire business model was built on being the middleman between students and answers, and now the student can go straight to the source. Atlassian is feeling it. SaaS companies that were really just workflow wrappers, the ones that gave you a nice interface to do something a well-prompted model can now do in a single conversation, they're watching their value proposition dissolve in real time. That part of the AI story is real, and it's already well underway.

But here's what I keep coming back to. That's not the story. That's the subplot.

Disruption has an arc. There's a before, a during, and an after. Blockbuster closes, and then things settle. The market reorganizes. Winners and losers emerge. We move on. The word itself comes from Clayton Christensen, and he coined it to describe a very specific competitive dynamic. One company outmaneuvers another because the incumbent couldn't see the shift. It's tidy. It has edges. And when we apply that word to AI, it actually makes people feel safer than they should. Because if this is "just" disruption, then it has a boundary. It has a resolution. Eventually the dust settles and we figure out who won.

I don't think the dust settles this time.

I've been thinking about electricity a lot lately. Not because it's a perfect analogy, but because it's the closest thing I can find to what I'm watching happen.

When electricity became widely available, it didn't just disrupt the candle industry. I mean, it did. Candle makers lost their monopoly on light. But that is the least interesting thing electricity did. What it actually did was restructure the entire physical world. Factories moved away from rivers because they didn't need water power anymore. Work shifted from daylight hours to any hour. Refrigeration changed the food supply chain from farm to table. Medicine, entertainment, communication, manufacturing, every single domain reorganized around the availability of cheap, reliable power.

Electricity didn't replace one thing. It changed the conditions under which everything operates. And once those conditions changed, nothing went back.

That's what I see when I look at AI. Not a technology coming for one industry or one type of job or one way of doing things. It's changing the substrate itself. The foundation that everything else is built on.

And there's a tell that most people are overlooking. The data centers.

Right now, the biggest companies in the world are spending billions of dollars building physical infrastructure at a pace we haven't seen since the buildout of the electrical grid itself. They're not doing that to disrupt Chegg. They're not doing that to take market share from Atlassian. You don't build a power grid to disrupt the candle market. You build a power grid because you're creating a utility. Something that everything else will eventually run on.

When I see those investments, I don't see companies preparing for a competitive shakeout. I see companies preparing for a permanent shift in how the world works.

I spend ten to twelve hours a day inside these models. And the thing that strikes me, the thing I keep trying to explain to the people in my life who aren't following this, is that my first instinct for every single problem I encounter is to bring it to a model. It doesn't matter what the domain is. Work, parenting, finances, health, home repair, creative projects, scheduling, decisions that have nothing to do with technology. All of it goes through AI first.

That's not disruption behavior. That's not me choosing a new provider over an old one. That's what it looks like when something becomes infrastructure in your life. When it stops being a tool you pick up for specific tasks and starts being the environment in which you do everything.

And once it becomes that, you don't go back. Just like nobody went back to working only during daylight hours once they had electric light. The shift is permanent because the capability is permanent.

I think the reason the word "disruption" feels so comfortable is because it implies containment. If AI is a disruptor, then we can draw a circle around the blast radius. These industries are affected. These jobs are at risk. These companies need to adapt or die. It gives us something to point at, something to measure, something to plan around. That's manageable.

But what if the blast radius is everything?

What if this isn't about which companies survive and which don't, but about the fundamental way humans interact with information, with creation, with problem solving, with work itself? What if the right comparison isn't Netflix versus Blockbuster but the invention of electricity, or the printing press, or written language?

Disruption ends. Whatever this is doesn't.

The frameworks we use to understand technological change were built for disruption. For substitution events. For one thing replacing another thing. "Transformation" is too corporate. "Revolution" is too dramatic and implies something that finishes. "Paradigm shift" makes me want to close my laptop. None of those words capture what's actually happening, and as long as we keep forcing AI into those frameworks, we're going to keep underestimating it. We're going to keep thinking this is about which companies win and which lose, when the actual story is that the game itself is changing.

I see this playing out every day, in every industry I've touched in my career. It doesn't matter if you're in banking, retail, healthcare, or fast food. The instinct in most organizations right now is one of two things. Either hand people the tools and hope for the best, or lock the tools down so tightly they become useless. Deploy first, figure it out later. Or don't deploy at all because the risk feels too big. Neither of those is the answer.

The answer is the hard, slow, unglamorous work that nobody wants to do. Rethinking how the organization itself operates. Not just which tools people use, but how innovation happens, how development happens, how data moves, what job titles mean, what work policies look like when AI is woven into the fabric of how a company functions. That's not a technology project. That's an organizational redesign. And almost nobody is willing to do it yet.

Most companies are trying to bolt AI onto the machine they already have. But if AI is infrastructure, you don't bolt infrastructure onto an existing structure. You design the structure around it. You don't wire a building for electricity after it's already built. You design the building with the electrical system in mind from the very beginning.

I'm not saying I have it all figured out. I don't. But every decision I make, everything I think about, revolves around one question: how do I use these tools to bring real value to the people I serve? How do I make my organization better, faster, more capable with everything I build? The companies that will thrive through this aren't the ones with the biggest AI budgets or the flashiest pilots. They're the ones that embrace this technology while keeping their people, their customers, and their purpose at the center of every decision.

Not figuring this out isn't an option.

So yes. AI is going to disrupt things. It's already doing it. But disruption is the side effect, not the story. The story is that AI is becoming infrastructure. And once something becomes infrastructure, it doesn't end. It becomes the thing everything else depends on.

Calling AI a disruptor is like calling electricity a candle replacement. It's technically true and it completely misses the point.

This isn't disruption.

This is infrastructure. The kind that rewires everything it touches. The kind that doesn't wait for you to be ready.

I'm not saying I have it figured out. But I refuse to be the person who looked at electricity and saw a better candle.

The current is already running. Build with it, or watch the world build around you.