The Dotcom era triggered waves of disruption across traditional industries. Some sectors were challenged, such as hotels facing competition from platforms like Airbnb, while others saw deeper structural change, such as ehailing redefining the taxi business.
And in some cases, entire models were wiped out, including the newspaper classifieds that underpinned much of legacy media. And, of course, “dotcom” also brings to mind the Dotcom Bubble, a period of rapid innovation accompanied by investor over‑exuberance and a sharp correction that followed. That crash nonetheless ultimately produced profound and enduring disruption to industries from hospitality to media.
It’s a pattern that feels familiar today. Whether or not AI is currently over‑hyped, we can already see how its capabilities are beginning to disrupt industries much as the early internet once did.
Market effects
It’s a prospect that investors are keenly alert to. The announcement of a new tool by AI firm Anthropic, purportedly capable of reviewing contracts and legal briefings, led to a $285 billion drop in software, financial services and asset management stocks. The sell-off reflected fears that AI-driven automation could disrupt the professional labour models that much of these sectors’ profitability depends on.
Specialised tools from Anthropic and other AI companies also threaten to disrupt software development jobs. Indeed, some hard-headed observers wonder if AI won’t disrupt software development as such. As one commentator put it, “with AI coding tools showing big improvements lately, companies could even develop their own software, without needing to buy it from established vendors.”
It’s a sentiment that Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, perhaps predictably, resisted, insisting that talk of software’s decline is “the most illogical thing in the world”.
The longer view
That said, AI’s disruption won’t stop at software. It is already embedded, to some degree, across services and operational workflows in legal, finance, healthcare, customer operations, logistics, and media. In our new age of AI, value, arguably, shifts toward firms that own the data, define the workflow, and invest in appropriate processes, skills and strategies.
But it’s also clear that we don’t yet know what the full pattern of disruption will be. Entire industries may be challenged, even vanish, or emerge in unfamiliar forms, just as ad tech once reconfigured, and in places erased, whole segments of the media economy.
As in the dotcom era, we can see the forces of disruption at work, even if we cannot yet see which industries will ultimately adapt or disappear.
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