Will AI Disrupt Your Business? Key Questions to Ask

1. “Generative AI: Differentiating Disruptors From the Disrupted,” MIT Technology Review, Feb. 29, 2024, www.technologyreview.com.

2. Disruptive technologies improve a product or service in ways that the market does not expect, typically by being lower priced or designed for a different set of consumers. These features make it difficult for incumbents to respond. See, for example, C.M. Christensen, M. Raynor, and R. McDonald, “What Is Disruptive Innovation?” Harvard Business Review 93, no. 12 (December 2015): 44-53.

3. Consider the argument in H. Totonis and R. Foster, “Breakthrough Banking: The Technology Is Here, the Revolution Has Begun,” Strategy+Business 5, no. 4 (October 1996).

4. C. Gilbert, “Change in the Presence of Residual Fit: Can Competing Frames Coexist?” Organization Science 17, no. 1 (January-February 2006): 150-167.

5. J. Gans, “The Disruption Dilemma” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2016). In this book, Gans distinguishes between demand-side and supply-side mechanisms.

6. F. Dell’Acqua, E. McFowland III, E. Mollick, et al., “Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier: Field Experimental Evidence of the Effects of AI on Knowledge Worker Productivity and Quality,” working paper 24-013, Harvard Business School, Boston, Massachusetts, October 2023.

7. A. Agrawal, J. Gans, and A. Goldfarb, “Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence” (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2023).

8. R.M. Henderson and K.B. Clark, “Architectural Innovation: The Reconfiguration of Existing Product Technologies and the Failure of Established Firms,” Administrative Science Quarterly 35, no. 1 (March 1990): 9-30.

9. Agrawal, Gans, and Goldfarb, “Power and Prediction.”

10. The question of which users to focus on is difficult. Certainly, it’s important to think about your existing mass-market users to see how AI might change their experience. But prior research on disruption has shown that you also need to think about non-users or those users with more basic needs, and to see how AI might be helping them. In other words — keep both groups in mind.

11. D.J. Teece, “Profiting From Technological Innovation: Implications for Integration, Collaboration, Licensing and Public Policy,” Research Policy 15, no. 6 (December 1986): 285-305.

12. P. Fore, “Chegg Got Its ‘Ass Kicked’ by AI but Hopes to Turn That Around With a New Investment in AI-Powered Tools,” Fortune, Sept. 11, 2023,

13. “Shutterstock Partners With OpenAI and Leads the Way to Bring AI-Generated Content to All,” PR Newswire, Oct. 25, 2022, www.prnewswire.com.

14. I. Visnjic, J. Birkinshaw, and C. Linz, “When Gradual Change Beats Radical Transformation,” MIT Sloan Management Review 63, no. 3 (spring 2022): 74-78.

15. J. Birkinshaw, “How Incumbent Firms Respond to Emerging Technologies: Comparing Supply-Side and Demand-Side Effects,” California Management Review 66, no. 1 (November 2023): 48-71.