Those who attended Blockbuster remember the ritual of renting movies at night and on weekends – and the moment when streaming made it obsolete. Few remember that Blockbuster itself sold its own ruin: I bought my first Blu-ray device there, which became my first streaming device. Blockbuster was invested in late fines and the arrangement of stores while the future of entertainment passed right at its door.
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Today, CEOs bet their careers in Artificial Intelligence (IA) with the same confidence as the once giant of Blockbuster video rental bet on the late fines. The lesson is not just about losing a disruption. It is about failing to read the signs that were well in sight.
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And with reports suggesting that AI will or destroy traditional industries such as consulting or making them proof of the future, it is worth looking back to move forward.
The problem is not the tools – they are the signs
For decades, corporate leaders in all sectors have interpreted badly or ignored market signs like these, even when they were obvious. I lived several technological transformations, and the message has never been as clear as it is with AI. If you are ignoring these signs, you are failing with your shareholders. And unlike previous waves, now there will be no time to recover.
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CEOs are currently both optimistic and anxious. Some are hiring for AI -related positions. Others are cutting personnel expecting efficiency gains. Some do both.
This is understandable, but loses the larger panorama. I was not just another tool for optimizing current processes. It is a strength multiplier that redefines which problems are worth solving.
Solving the wrong problem
Think about the 1990s call centers. Companies ran to implement the recording of calls. But they never asked the most important question: why are customers calling? The real value was not in monitoring the calls, but to use this data to eliminate the need for these calls.
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When companies finally understood this, they developed self -service portals, predictive support, automated resolution and solutions for broken processes on the client’s journey.
This error is repeated in all major transformations. Using IA to optimize existing processes is like a logging tree tie chainsaws at the ends of manual axes. If you do that, the productivity would plummet. Teach your lumberjacks to adapt to the new technology, and you modernize.
However, leaders tend to try to optimize inefficient processes with new and brilliant technology rather than questioning their existence. And AI exposes this large scale failure. AI will do incredible job accelerating bad processes and amplifying employee incompetence if not used carefully.
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The truth is tough: it has already surpassed humans in many cognitive tasks, from data analysis to patterns detection and problem diagnosis that no one else sees. Next decade winners will not be companies that use to polish existing processes – they will be those that let the signs discover that human intuition does not perceive and reinvent their operational model from it.
More than half of Fortune 500 companies of the year 2000 no longer exist. Most did not fail for lack of vision. Failed because the leaders did not interpret the signals fast enough.
We are drowned in data, while AI was born to swim in them. Blockbuster in 2007 was not blind to Netflix – it was just too focused on refining the store experience to recognize that streaming was the only problem that mattered. This is how the incumbers die: not for lack of effort, but because they solve the wrong problems on a large scale.
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AI prosperous where humans fail, filtering the complexity, separating a sign of noise and pointing to problems that we didn’t even know we should solve.
The blind point of billions of dollars
The consultancy illustrates this perfectly. Many projects still aim at the wrong problem from the beginning. Companies spend billions on “Ia by AI” – automating costs, creating panels, punctual solutions – while ignoring the most difficult and important issue: how does this change our ability to grow?
The true lost opportunity is huge. Most players Traditional doesn’t want to change. AI can already analyze how companies find, win and maintain customers, signaling where performance is failing and where investments have decreasing return. She suggests changes before competitors realize. Still, most CEO conversations revolve around staff reduction. This completely ignores the main aspect of the issue.
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Stop pretending. Start building
The story moves faster than we remember. From the first flight of the Wright brothers until the arrival of the moon has passed only 60 years. From Apple’s “1984” commercial to global e -commerce? As soon as it has spent a decade. Netflix launched the streaming in 2007. In 2010, Blockbuster had already disappeared.
AI adoption curve will be even faster. The only CEOs who will thrive are those who build the AI at the center of the business, not those who treat it as an additional efficiency tool. And this is not just about technology. Thought matters. The teams you gather matters. The urgency matters.
Ia is not a bright tool – it is a sign detector in a world where blindness for signs kills companies. Ignore it, and you risk building your own obsolescence. Embrace it, and you give your company the only real advantage that matters: the ability to see what others don’t see and act before it’s too late.
