Industries Changed by the Internet, and the AI Wave That Will Transform Them Faster

The internet didn’t just add a sales channel to old industries. It rebuilt photography, music, video, publishing, communications, travel, and retail around new economics, and the companies that refused to adapt disappeared. Artificial intelligence (AI) is the next rebuild, and because it rides on top of the internet, the cloud, and the smartphone we already own, it is moving far faster.

Over the past few decades, technology has repeatedly reshaped the business landscape, making entire categories obsolete while opening far bigger opportunities for the people and companies willing to change. I’ve watched it happen throughout my career, and I’ve been on both sides of it.

What’s different now is the speed. The internet took the better part of two decades to hollow out video rental, recorded music, and department stores. The AI transformation underway doesn’t need anyone to lay cable, buy a modem, or wait for broadband. It ships as software to billions of connected devices and businesses overnight, and it is now learning to act on our behalf. That’s why I believe the next decade of change will be more radical, and more compressed, than anything the internet delivered.

It’s worth looking back at the industries the internet transformed, what the survivors did right, and then forward at how AI will drive the next wave.

How the Internet Rewrote Seven Industries

Photography: From Film to Phones

Digital photography revolutionized how images are captured and shared, and the smartphone finished the job. Traditional film leaders struggled to adapt. Kodak filed for bankruptcy protection in 2012, and Polaroid went through bankruptcy in 2001 and again in 2008. Both brands survive today in very different forms.

The democratization of photography created an explosion of visual content. That drove demand for content creators, photo and video editing software, social platforms, and digital asset management. The camera became a feature of a device everyone carries.

Music: From Records to Streams

I was actually on the list of Napster users in the Metallica lawsuit. It enraged me because I had purchased all their music and even attended their concerts. It was simply easier to download the music than to digitize it myself. That’s the lesson the recording industry learned the hard way: convenience wins.

Tower Records closed its US stores in 2006, and HMV entered administration more than once. Streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music now dominate distribution, and they created entirely new roles in playlist curation, audio data analysis, recommendation engineering, and creator marketing.

Video: From Rental Stores to Streaming

On-demand streaming decimated video rental. Blockbuster filed for bankruptcy in 2010, outpaced by Netflix and its DVD-by-mail and streaming model, and Hollywood Video was liquidated the same year.

Streaming leaders like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Disney+ now lead home entertainment. The shift fueled a boom in original production, UI and UX design for viewing apps, and data science for recommendations. It also democratized storytelling, with hundreds of releases every week instead of a few blockbusters.

Publishing: From Print to Digital

Digital publishing and e-readers transformed how we consume the written word. Borders was liquidated in 2011 after being slow to adapt to ecommerce and e-books, and local newspapers have been closing for two decades.

News desert counties in the US rose to 213 in 2025, and another 1,524 counties have only one remaining news source, leaving about 50 million Americans with limited or no access to local news. Newspaper closures rose to 136 in the past year, while more than 300 local news startups launched over the past five years, 80% of them digital-only.

Medill Local News Initiative, Northwestern University, Medill State of Local News Report 2025, October 2025

Online news sites, blogs, newsletters, and e-book platforms replaced much of traditional print, and they opened opportunities for digital creators, search engine optimization (SEO) specialists, developers, content management systems (CMS), and designers.

Communications: From Telegraph to Internet

Telephone networks, and later the internet, made telegraph services obsolete. Western Union sent its last telegram in 2006 and reinvented itself around money transfers. The transition paved the way for network engineers, security specialists, and voice over internet protocol (VoIP) platforms.

Travel and Classifieds: From Agents and Print Ads to Platforms

Thomas Cook collapsed in 2019, unable to compete with online booking platforms like Expedia and marketplaces like Airbnb. Newspaper classified revenue evaporated as Craigslist and eBay gave buyers and sellers a faster, cheaper way to find each other.

Retail: From Malls to Marketplaces

Online shopping reshaped retail. Circuit City went bankrupt in 2008, Toys “R” Us filed in 2017, Sears in 2018, and JCPenney in 2020. Amazon and other ecommerce platforms captured enormous share, creating roles in marketplace management, supply chain optimization, customer experience (CX), and conversion optimization.

What the Survivors Did Right

Every one of those disruptions followed the same pattern. The technology made something faster, cheaper, or more convenient for the customer, and the incumbents protected their existing business model instead of serving that customer. The companies and professionals that thrived did a few things well:

• They followed the customer, not the format. Journalism, photography, and video production didn’t disappear. Demand shifted to digital, and the people who moved with it grew.
• They turned expertise into a premium service. Smartphones put a camera in every pocket, yet brands still hire professional videographers for composition, lighting, and storytelling.
• They kept the human parts human. Customers still value empathy and judgment when a problem is complex, even as self-service handles the routine.
• They kept learning. Skilled trades, teaching, and consulting adapted their tools and methods while their core value stayed in demand.

Why the AI Wave Will Move Faster

The internet had to be built before it could disrupt anything. Networks, browsers, payment systems, and devices all had to reach critical mass. AI doesn’t carry that burden. It is delivered through the infrastructure the internet already built: cloud data centers, broadband, smartphones, and the software every business already uses. Adoption can happen with a product update.

88% of respondents report their organizations regularly use AI in at least one business function, up from 78% a year earlier. 23% say their organizations are scaling an agentic AI system somewhere in the enterprise, and another 39% have begun experimenting with AI agents. The online survey ran June 25 through July 29, 2025, with 1,993 participants.

McKinsey & Company, The State of AI in 2025: Agents, Innovation, and Transformation, November 2025

Three accelerants make this wave different:

• The models improve continuously. Large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI (GenAI) systems get more capable with every release, and every business using them inherits the improvement without a rebuild.
• AI improves the tools that build AI. Coding assistants and agents now write, test, and deploy software, which shortens every product cycle, including the next generation of AI products.
• AI is learning to act, not just answer. The shift from chatbots that respond to agents that complete work is what turns a productivity tool into an industry-changing force.

From Generative AI to Agentic AI

Generative AI writes, summarizes, designs, and codes when you prompt it. Agentic AI goes further. An agent is given a goal, plans the steps, uses tools and data to execute them, checks its own work, and hands off to a person only when judgment or approval is needed. Multiple agents can coordinate with each other, each specializing in part of a workflow.

Agents work through application programming interfaces (APIs) and, increasingly, through open standards like the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which connects agents to tools and data, and the Agent2Agent protocol (A2A), which lets agents from different vendors cooperate. When an agent can’t find an API, it can operate a browser and click through an interface like a person would. That means almost any digital task can now be delegated.

40% of enterprise applications will be integrated with task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. In Gartner’s best-case scenario, agentic AI could drive approximately 30% of enterprise application software revenue by 2035, up from 2% in 2025.

Gartner, Gartner Predicts 40% of Enterprise Apps Will Feature Task-Specific AI Agents by 2026, August 26, 2025

That’s an extraordinary pace. The jump from almost no agents to agents embedded across business software is happening in about a year, not a decade.

How Agentic AI Will Turn SaaS Upside Down

For two decades, software as a service (SaaS) has been the default way businesses buy technology. Much of what companies pay for today, though, isn’t the core system of record. It’s the middleware wrapped around it: tools that move data from one system to another, trigger a workflow, sync a list, or give an employee a screen to copy information between applications. Agentic AI is going to absorb most of that layer.

Think about how much of a typical technology stack exists only because systems don’t talk to each other, and because people need an interface to push work along:

Here’s how I expect the market to reshape itself:

• Systems of record get more valuable. The platforms that hold the authoritative data, such as customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), commerce, finance, and identity, become the foundation agents depend on.
• APIs become the product. Vendors with complete, well-documented, secure APIs and agent-ready connectors win. Vendors that lock data behind an interface become friction that customers route around.
• Seat-based pricing gives way to usage and outcomes. When an agent does the work of a team, charging per human login stops making sense. Expect pricing tied to tasks completed, results delivered, or data consumed.
• Thin middleware disappears. Products whose main job is moving data between systems, or putting a generic interface on someone else’s data, face the steepest decline.
• Custom becomes affordable. Businesses can have agents build industry-specific workflows and tools that would once have required a development team, rather than accepting a one-size-fits-all application.

I’ve already experienced this in my own work, managing tasks, content, and records across several platforms without opening a single dashboard. I wrote about that in SaaS Isn’t Dead. Your UI Is. The data and infrastructure still matter enormously. The interface and the glue in between are what’s being commoditized.

Robotics and Autonomy Bring AI Into the Physical World

The internet mostly transformed information industries. AI is reaching into physical ones, where automation, computer vision, and autonomous decision-making are converging with robotics.

542,076 industrial robots were installed worldwide in 2024, the second-highest annual total in history and more than double the number ten years earlier. The global operational stock of industrial robots reached 4,663,698 units, up 9%.

International Federation of Robotics, World Robotics 2025: Industrial Robots, Executive Summary, 2025

Transportation is the most visible example. Self-driving ride-hailing has moved from pilot programs to everyday service in a growing list of cities, led by Waymo.

Waymo reported providing 500,000 paid robotaxi rides every week across 10 US cities, a tenfold increase from 50,000 weekly paid trips in May 2024.

TechCrunch, Waymo’s Skyrocketing Ridership in One Chart, March 27, 2026

Combine autonomous vehicles, warehouse robotics, drones, and AI-driven planning, and logistics, manufacturing, and transportation look much like music did in 2000: on the edge of a complete rebuild.

Industries Poised for Radical, Accelerated Change

No sector is untouched, but here is where I expect the most dramatic shifts as AI agents and automation mature:

The Jobs Picture: Big Churn, Bigger Opportunity

Every prior wave eliminated jobs and created more of them, and the forecasts suggest this one will too, just faster.

Employers surveyed expect 170 million new jobs to be created and 92 million jobs to be displaced between 2025 and 2030, a structural churn of 22% of today’s formal jobs and a net increase of 78 million jobs. The survey captured more than 1,000 employers representing over 14 million workers across 55 economies.

World Economic Forum, The Future of Jobs Report 2025, January 2025

The new roles will cluster around directing, governing, and building on AI:

• Agent orchestrators and workflow designers who define goals, guardrails, and handoffs between agents and people.
• AI governance, risk, and ethics specialists who make sure autonomous systems are safe, compliant, and accountable.
• Data and knowledge curators who keep the information agents rely on accurate and current.
• Robotics and automation integrators who bring AI into factories, warehouses, hospitals, and vehicles.
• AI-assisted creators and strategists who pair human taste and judgment with machine speed.
• Domain experts whose deep knowledge of an industry becomes more valuable when agents can execute on it.

How to Prepare for the Next Wave

For Individuals

• Use AI tools and agents daily in your own work so you understand what they do well and where they fail.
• Invest in the skills agents amplify: judgment, communication, creativity, and deep domain expertise.
• Learn to delegate work to agents, review their output, and design the process around them.
• Treat learning as continuous, because the tools will keep changing every few months.

For Businesses

• Inventory the middleware and seat-based tools in your stack and identify what agents could absorb.
• Invest in clean, well-governed data and systems of record with strong APIs, since that is what agents run on.
• Redesign workflows around agents rather than bolting AI onto old processes.
• Reskill your people to supervise, direct, and improve AI-driven work, and set clear governance before you scale.

For Educators and Policymakers

• Teach AI literacy alongside critical thinking, ethics, and problem-solving.
• Support workers moving into new roles with practical, short-cycle training.
• Build partnerships between industry and education so curricula keep pace with the tools.
• Create sensible guardrails for autonomous systems that protect people without freezing progress.

Takeaways

• The internet transformed industries by making things faster, cheaper, and more convenient, and incumbents that protected old models failed.
• AI is moving faster because it is delivered through infrastructure the internet already built.
• Agentic AI shifts software from answering questions to completing work, and enterprise adoption is happening in a matter of months.
• SaaS will be turned upside down as agents absorb integration layers, workflow tools, point solutions, and seat-based apps, while systems of record and APIs gain value.
• Robotics and autonomy are extending AI into manufacturing, logistics, and transportation.
• The professionals and companies that learn to direct AI, rather than compete with it, will capture the opportunity.

Learn How Agentic AI Works

Agentic AI’s impact on software deserves a deeper look. If you want to understand why the all-in-one platform is losing ground to bespoke, agent-built systems on top of raw infrastructure, read my article, The Coming SaaS Apocalypse: Agentic AI and the API Economy are Decoupling the Front-End from the Infrastructure.