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Is generative AI sustaining innovation? - Web Directions

Is generative AI sustaining innovation?

John Allsopp

27th March, 2023

@johnallsopp

Stable Diffusion generated image. Prompt: Illustration for an article about disruptive innovation

The term ‘disruption‘ has become so overused as to be essentially meaningless. But it comes originally (in the sense we use it) from Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Dilemma*, who gave considerable though to the nature of technological innovation and its impact on businesses and industries.

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Christensen describes “disruptive innovation [as creating] a new market and value network or enters at the bottom of an existing market and eventually displaces established market-leading firms, products, and alliances.”

But he also talks of other kinds of innovation,’sustaining’ innovations, which can be of two kinds.

Evolutionary–An innovation that improves a product in an existing market in ways that customers are expecting (e.g., fuel injection for gasoline engines, which displaced carburetors.) [1]

and

Revolutionary–An innovation that is unexpected, but nevertheless does not affect existing markets (e.g., the first automobiles in the late 19th century, which were expensive luxury items, and as such very few were sold) [2]

Right now it’s fair to say there’s a lot of attention being paid to generative AI, in particular large language models, above all those from OpenAI. I don’t think this enthusiasm is misplaced.

But I have been wondering about the applications we’ve been seeing–their incorporation into office productivity tools like Microsoft Office and Google Workspace, all manner of summarisation technologies, transcription tools, developer tools like Github Co-pilot, and Adobe and Canva’s recent announcements of AI based design tools. What type of disruption would these be best characterised as being?

My instinct is, for the most part they’re evolutionary–”improving a product in an existing market in ways that customers are expecting”,and perhaps at times revolutionary–”unexpected, but nevertheless does not affect existing markets”, but what are we seeing that is ‘disruptive’–’an innovation that creates a new market or enters at the bottom of an existing market by providing a different set of values, which ultimately (and unexpectedly) overtakes incumbents’?

Code generation tools? We’ve seen some very engaging examples, but we’ve been hearing about the promise of ‘no-code’ since 4GLs promised to do away with programming while I was studying Computer Science in the 1980s. Sustaining I’d argue.

What else do these technologies enable that might be called genuinely disruptive?

Or is it too early to tell just yet?

What have you seen that might be genuinely disruptive–not just in terms of ‘imagine if/when…’ but something possible, at least nascently, right now? Love your thoughts.

*Yes, there are many quite valid criticisms of Christensen’s thesis, but I still find it a useful way of thinking about the impact of new technologies on businesses and industries.

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