Another personal piece. I have been thinking about a question that feels increasingly personal: if AI changes my industry, will I recognise the change early—or will I defend the way I already work?
It is easy to believe that established companies fail because they become arrogant, complacent, or slow. Sometimes that is true. But when I read Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma, I found his explanation both more interesting and more uncomfortable.
His argument, as I understood it, was that successful companies can fail precisely because they continue doing the things that made them successful.
Good companies listen to their customers. They invest in their most profitable products. They improve quality, add features, and direct their resources towards opportunities with the strongest expected returns.
These all sound like sensible decisions. In most situations, they are.
The problem begins when a new technology enters the market in a form that initially looks inferior, less profitable, or irrelevant to a company’s best customers. The company may understand the technology perfectly well and still decide—quite rationally—that it is not worth pursuing.
A newcomer sees the same opportunity differently. It has fewer customers, products, and revenue streams to protect. A small market may be large enough for it. Lower margins may be acceptable. It can begin with a simpler product, serve people overlooked by established companies, and improve from there.
Eventually, that simpler product may become good enough for the mainstream market. By then, the newcomer has accumulated experience, customers, and momentum. The established company is forced to respond from behind.
This is the part that I'm always afraid of: the incumbent may not have ignored the future. It may have seen the future and rejected it because, at the time, the future did not look financially attractive.
That made me wonder how often I do the same thing in my own life. When I become good at something, I naturally want to protect it. I want my existing skills, experience, and knowledge to remain valuable. When a new technology appears, my first instinct may be to use it to improve what I already do—not to ask whether what I do still needs to exist.
I suspect many companies are responding to AI in the same way. A software company adds an AI assistant to its existing application. A consultancy uses AI to produce its reports faster. A recruitment platform uses it to rank CVs more efficiently. These can all be worthwhile improvements, but they leave the underlying product and business largely unchanged.
The software still has the same workflow. The consultancy still sells reports. The recruitment platform still assumes that CVs, applications, and candidate rankings are necessary.
A newcomer has the freedom to ask a more dangerous question: does the existing process need to exist at all? Instead of helping someone complete ten steps more quickly, it may remove nine of them. Instead of helping a consultancy produce a report faster, it may deliver much of the desired outcome directly. Instead of using AI to screen job applications, it may find an entirely different way to connect people with work.
An established company may hesitate to pursue such an idea because it could reduce prices, cannibalise existing products, or undermine the business that currently pays its bills. A newcomer has less to lose. What looks like a threat to one company may look like an opportunity to another.
And this is where Christensen’s idea becomes personal for me. We are all incumbents somewhere. A company can be an incumbent in its market, but a person can also become an incumbent in their own career. We build our identity around particular skills, tools, and ways of working. We become attached to the process because we have invested years in mastering it.
Then something changes. The uncomfortable question is whether we will use the new technology only to protect our existing position—or whether we are willing to reconsider that position entirely. This does not mean abandoning everything whenever a new tool appears. Most new technologies are overhyped, and most startups do not disrupt anything. Experience, judgement, trust, and deep knowledge remain valuable.
But protecting the past should be a conscious decision, not an automatic reaction. So the question I am now trying to ask myself is not simply, “How can AI help me do my current work better?” It is: “If I had none of my current habits, status, or investments to protect, how would I approach this work today?”
That may be the real innovator’s dilemma—not only for companies, but for me personally.