Will AI Disrupt Your Business? Key Questions to Ask

How AI will affect individual businesses will vary widely. A diagnostic framework can help you identify its potential impacts and navigate disruption strategically.

- By Julian Birkinshaw

AS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE changes the business world, executives’ biggest concern is disruption. They worry that their companies will go the way of Blockbuster or AOL if their leaders aren’t quick enough to respond to emerging technologies. In a 2024 survey conducted by MIT Technology Review, 60% of respondents agreed that “generative AI technology will substantially disrupt our industry over the next five years.”1

Most businesspeople now understand that there’s a distinction between disruptive and sustaining technologies and that they should be concerned about the disruptive ones.2 But only in retrospect is it clear whether a technology was disruptive to incumbents or helped them sustain their market leadership. For example, many observers predicted that the internet would disrupt financial services, yet the big banks of today are as powerful as they were 30 years ago.3

The usual inclination of executives in many industries is to assume that AI will be disruptive. I am not convinced that that is an adequate or correct response. Yes, it’s important to take looming threats seriously, but fearmongering isn’t helpful either, as it can lead to defensive behavior and a narrow set of responses.4 A smarter approach is to frame AI as both a threat and an opportunity, and for executives to think about how AI might affect their business specifically. This creates space for thoughtful and creative ways of responding.