Beyond Hype to the Real Shifts Reshaping Value Creation
We’re wired to spot disruption in the wrong places—chasing the latest AI feature or platform, expecting it to upend everything overnight. Google’s new ‘Shop with AI’ mode is already stirring such claims, but as my latest Substack essay Why We Keep Misreading Disruption explores the real question isn’t what these technologies do, but what deeper systemic shifts they reveal. This piece unpacks why our visions of the future often miss the mark, how globalisation’s story helps explain structural change, and what it means to see disruption as a ‘punctuation’ rather than just incremental progress.
The fundamental misunderstanding about technological change is a failure to distinguish between incremental advances and paradigm shifts. Incremental progress—making systems faster, cheaper, or more efficient—operates within existing frameworks. Disruption, by contrast, restructures the core logic of how value is created and coordinated. Most hype mistakes the first for the second.
‘Shop with AI’ might be impressive, but it is not a silver bullet overturning e-commerce’s foundations. Rather, it invites us to look beyond the product to the underlying shifts in how demand, supply, and coordination interact. Disruption is not about the next shiny thing; it’s about resolving entrenched constraints in a system.
To understand systemic change, we must avoid the trap of using today as a lens to predict the future or reinterpret the past. Like historians analysing the French Revolution on its own terms, we need to appreciate the broader confluence of forces shaping our moment.
Futurists often get it partly right—they can project current trends within a paradigm—but they falter in anticipating the paradigm shift itself. Kurzweil’s predictions on AI illustrate this tension: many accurate extrapolations within the digital computing paradigm, but less success predicting breakthroughs beyond its boundaries, such as achieving Artificial General Intelligence.
Richard Baldwin’s model of globalisation, based on cascading constraints, provides a valuable framework. It identifies two prior “unbundlings”:
- The separation of production from consumption enabled by lower trade costs.
- The splitting of production stages into global value chains driven by falling coordination costs.
Each unbundling represents a punctuation, a system-wide shift. Between these lie incremental developments easily mistaken for disruption.
The question for today’s AI and ‘Shop with AI’ is: do they mark incremental steps or a third unbundling?
The emerging insight reframes the next disruption not on the supply side but on the demand side. Traditional globalisation focused on moving goods and production closer to demand. The new shift globalises customer interaction by collapsing the friction between intent and fulfilment.
‘Shop with AI’ exemplifies this “demand-side unbundling.” Instead of navigating fixed marketplaces, consumers interact with AI layers dynamically assembling solutions from distributed supply in real time. Value crystallises where intent emerges, not at manufacturing or logistics nodes.
This shift is about compression—closing the gap between desire and delivery—and fundamentally reconfiguring value flows from supply chain optimisation to interface orchestration.
If value now emerges primarily at the customer interface, businesses must recalibrate priorities: investing in understanding and orchestrating demand expression rather than solely owning physical assets or optimising supply chains.
The “new bottleneck” becomes the interface where intent is captured and resolved, shifting advantage from traditional search engines to trusted agents and capability orchestrators. This reframing challenges incumbent platform power and opens the door for more open, equitable ecosystems where smaller players can participate without excessive “distribution tax.”
Moreover, the drift of final assembly closer to the customer—seen in manufacturing, recruitment, and other domains—reflects a layering of “proximity to intent” over geography. The future of globalisation is not its end but a subtle, profound reorientation from distance to desire.
Disruption isn’t a product launch or a headline AI feature. It’s a systemic punctuation—a deep structural transformation that resolves fundamental tensions in how value is created and coordinated. The lesson from ‘Shop with AI’ is to look beyond the technology’s capabilities and instead ask: where is the system starting to bend? Where is intent crystallising and frictions compressing?
Understanding disruption in these terms reframes the future of globalisation and commerce as an unfolding demand-side unbundling, offering fresh lenses for business strategy, policy, and innovation.
If this resonates, I explore these ideas in greater depth in my full Substack essay: Why We Keep Misreading Disruption.