Technologies are often called disruptive. But what makes a technology truly disruptive? What has made the PC a disruptive technology? Or artificial intelligence, for that matter? And at what time did it become a disruptive technology? While many would accept that AI was a very disruptive technology starting from 2022 onwards, most of it was available much earlier. Think Generative AI, chatbots, etc. Think of ELIZA, the 60s era psychology chatbot by Joseph Weizenbaum.
If we understand the mechanics better, we can begin to see how we can predict these disruptions better.
In the late 80s I saw the PC revolution come up and shortly afterwards client-server computing, including all the things that went wrong. A little later, the Internet revolution from boom to bust, and back up again. Then, early 2010s, cloud computing exploded, and I started teaching cloud security. All of these led to dramatic shifts of power in organizations, and therefore in the way IT was organized. Here I’d like to explore the underlying mechanisms.
While there are many uses of the word “disruptive” in this context, I’d like to focus on the degree to which a disruptive technology will shift power in organizations.
In my professional career I have seen, as mentioned elsewhere, a few major disruptive changes.
The mainframe was typically a central corporate strategic decision, necessitating a corporate IT department. That also implies that conflicts around its use would percolate to the top. Conflict escalation is one of the essentials of corporate governance.
AI has been around for many years, some of it even decades, but its use really took off after the introduction of a democratized tool that everybody could use: ChatGPT.
Power dynamics shift when new actors come into the ecosystem. For example, minicomputers came within reach of department budgets, causing those departments to also start buying them. ChatGPT allowed people to try out GenAI and apply it to their work.
More affordable access to technology introduces new buyers in the procurement practices. Freemium business models make that even more accessible. The game is that value from these services is demonstrated with a free proof of concept, which opens the discussion to talk about bigger budgets. Freemium is part of GitLab’s official pricing strategy.
Disruption is therefore often driven by price points and accessibility, and less by the actual invention. And companies have many formal and informal decision makers when it comes to technology adoption. They all have their own budget limits. When the price points drop, power shifts to people with lower budgets. It will fall out of governance that is designed for higher price points. This is what we saw with the introduction of PCs and cloud computing.