The AI invasion has started, says Bryant University’s Thomas Dougherty, and there will be casualties — as well as new dynasties.
“We’re going to see some major upheaval within the next 10 or 15 years,” says Dougherty, an Executive in Residence of Information Systems and Analytics. “The implementation of AI is going to disrupt a lot of industries, and a lot of major names will be replaced.”
No one is safe, not even behemoths like Amazon.
Dougherty has been at the frontline of two previous technology revolutions. A career working for industry leaders like Putnam Investments, PwC, and most recently, Fidelity Investments saw him take the lead in helping companies use data for analytic purposes in the 1980s and in guiding companies through the dotcom boom — transformative moments in the history of business, and the world.
Now he’s preparing his students for the next big thing. In developing his “Application of Artificial Intelligence” course, which will launch next semester, Dougherty has spoken to executives across a wide range of industries about what the near future will look like.
The pivotal tool in this battle royale, states Dougherty, will be “agentic” AI — autonomous virtual “agents” that can act, react, research, and negotiate. It’s a development that’s poised to shake up and reimagine the business landscape.
Dougherty notes that Meta Platforms CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently said he believes there’s going to be more AI agents than people. But many of the established power players, Dougherty argues, aren’t prepared to take full advantage of it.
“We've been automating forever, and this will continue that automation. But that's not a revolution.”
“When I talk to large companies about artificial intelligence, what they're really talking about is machine learning and automating their processes,” says Dougherty. “They're doing the same things they're doing now, but they're using predictive AI to make it more efficient; things like marketing automation.
“I don't think they feel the pressure to totally reinvent what they're doing yet,” he states.
There are many obstacles to AI adoption, Dougherty notes.
Established companies, with gargantuan amounts of infrastructure, face challenges with managing the data necessary for large-scale AI adoption, high implementation costs, and difficulties integrating AI with legacy systems.
“The typical bank has hundreds of vice presidents and many departments, often with overlapping responsibilities. You tell them we're going to change everything about the way we do things. It's just not going to happen,” he explains.
But those impediments are standing in the way of progress. Too big to fail becomes too big to pivot. “We've been automating forever, and this will continue that automation,” says Dougherty. “But that's not a revolution.”
Startups, however, are built from the ground up to meet the moment and are hungry to exploit the gaps in the market — a far cry from the conservative outlook held by legacy businesses. They are powered by AI at its full potential from the very start, not as a tweak to existing structures.
“They're not burdened with the old paradigm,” he argues. “The British invented the tank, but the Germans were the first to use it effectively because their army was totally obliterated in World War I, and they reinvented it around the tank while the British Army was still riding horses.”
He points to one of the companies he spoke to, Delectable AI, as an example of a newcomer reinventing an old space: meal prep and food purchasing. “If you put in all your health concerns and your health goals, it tells you what to eat. It learns not only what is healthy for you, but what you like,” states Dougherty. “And it can do the shopping for you.”
“I don't get a sense that they're very worried just yet, which may be a form of blissful ignorance on their part.”
Legacy companies, Dougherty says, should be investing in buying up entrepreneurial — or investing in intrapreneurial — groups that are rethinking the way their field works. “I don't get a sense that they're very worried just yet, which may be a form of blissful ignorance on their part,” he muses. “But that's going to change.”
We’ll see the biggest transitions in the industries that are the most “broken,” notes Dougherty, the ones where there’s the most friction in the system. Food production is one, healthcare another. Retail, he suggests, is near the top.
Amazon, points out Dougherty, was an industry game changer because it utilized the evolving internet to reimagine how people shopped for products, by giving them more options and improved browsing. But in many ways, it was still just an elevated storefront.
Now, however, new AI-powered contenders are coming for the established supergiant’s crown.
“Everyone is always looking to cut out the middleman,” Dougherty observes. In the future, “You're going to go online, and you're going to ask an AI agent, ‘Find me five shirts that you think fit my style and my budget,’ and they're going to show it to you right from the source.”
That puts even a giant in danger. “Whether Amazon will be the dominant shopping platform in 20 years is, I think, very much in question,” he notes. "They are doing everything they can to hold off that threat."