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Mar­i­ano Browne

All man-made prod­ucts have a fi­nite or ex­pect­ed use­ful life. The same is true of busi­ness mod­els. Tech­no­log­i­cal ad­vance­ments af­fect busi­ness­es at all lev­els, strate­gic, op­er­a­tional, fi­nan­cial and com­pet­i­tive. Its im­pact, there­fore, is dis­rup­tive at the lev­el of the in­di­vid­ual firm as well as whole in­dus­tries. The cur­rent fo­cus on ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence and its busi­ness ap­pli­ca­tion is a case in point.

The dif­fi­cul­ty is that busi­ness­es may not see how the change will af­fect them and can­not adapt, or adapt in time. Change oc­curs at the mar­gins or in par­tic­u­lar mar­ket seg­ments and is there­fore over­looked. The new prod­uct may be sim­pler, cheap­er or more con­ve­nient, but not nec­es­sar­i­ly tech­ni­cal­ly su­pe­ri­or. But tech­nol­o­gy im­proves quick­ly (Moore’s Law) to meet the needs of the main­stream mar­ket, and once it be­comes main­stream, it dis­places com­peti­tors.