As content streaming has disrupted music, is disrupting video and television, so might AI potentially disrupt industry leaders ranging from Alphabet to Meta, just as search and social media were unimagined substitutes for advertising venues of all types.
It is one thing to predict that artificial intelligence will automate many--if not most--complex cognitive tasks. It is another matter to predict what entirely-new value propositions could be created, some of which pose the possibility of disruption of firm and industry market positions, unit economics, competitive dynamics, and business strategies.
In other words, search and social media disrupted revenue models for newspapers, magazines, broadcast TV, broadcast radio, video on demand and linear multichannel video because search and social media became substitute venues for advertising.
And perhaps one big change will be a shift of “services” turning into “products,” the inverse of the prior trend whereby products became services.
What, after all, is a bot or agent that provides what a human professional used to supply? Will “customer service” or any sort of “advice” morph from human-provided expert “service” to an AI-provided product or function?
Content producers worry about this a lot, and should. AI threatens to displace acting, writing, composing or editing (professional services) with AI substitutes that are “products” rather than “services.”
It’s the mirror image of the prior process whereby software and other content “products” became “services” (shrink-wrapped software became cloud-based subscriptions; television shifted from over-the-air broadcast to subscription video). In fact, the list of former products that became services is quite extensive:
• Software (Software-as-a-Service)
• Computing power (Cloud computing)
• Music (Streaming services)
• Movies and TV shows (Video streaming platforms)
• Books and magazines (E-book subscriptions and digital content platforms)
• Car ownership (Car-sharing and ride-hailing services)
• Office productivity tools (Cloud-based collaboration suites)
• Data storage (Cloud storage services)
• Photography (Photo storage and editing services)
• Gaming (Cloud gaming and game subscription services)
• Home security systems (Smart home monitoring services)
• Lighting (Lighting-as-a-Service)
• Manufacturing equipment (Equipment-as-a-Service)
• Transportation (Mobility-as-a-Service)
• Communication tools (Unified Communications-as-a-Service)
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