Surviving an era of disruption

What is happening right now? Every business is facing disruption in 4 ways:

1. Customer Acquisition

• Search is radically changing. No one has any idea how either organic or paid search will evolve. B2B companies are already getting more leads from chatGPT than Google. Google has launched AI Mode but there’s no ads. It’s the wild west and anyone who knows what’s coming is lying.
• My personal take is that we’re moving from ranking to recommendations. Every link that survives will need a reason to exist.

2. Product Expectations

• Consumers now expect every search box to be as smart as chatGPT

3. Operations

• Your engineers have to learn whole new workflows to work alongside AI agents

4. Access to Capital

• Access to capital is harder, funding is reserved for “AI companies” now…

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What does this all feel like in business? It feel anxious. Like the calm before the storm. While the AI disruption dominates the news cycles it’s not really showing up in the data yet… To paraphrase a headline, disruption is everywhere except the data

I’m reminded of the visualization of anxiety in Inside Out 2 when they have a panic attack:

The kinds of tensions this environment creates:

• Teams being asked to re-prioritize based on abstract looming threats that don’t yet show up in their data
• Companies feeling like they should be doing more with less, while also needing to do lots of new things for the first time
• Individuals entirely unsure when it’s ok to use AI silently, or when to disclose “AI helped me with this”. Is using AI an admission or a badge of honor?
• Executives needing to both mitigate and leverage AI in their roadmaps while only understanding a surface level

These tensions are on top of the regular garden variety tensions of tariffs, looming recessions and so on…

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Clearly