Before you panic about AI, remember what was supposed to happen to retail
- AI will change how we work. But probably not in every way we’re being told.
- We’ve heard “this changes everything” before. Remember the internet?
- Technology moves fast. People don’t.
- AI is powerful. That doesn’t make it infallible.
- Pay attention to AI. Just don’t believe all the hype.
AI is going to change everything.
At least that’s what we’re told.
It will eliminate jobs, replace professionals, and fundamentally alter the way human beings work. Some of those predictions are probably right. Others are probably nonsense. The hard part is telling which is which.
I’ve been around long enough to have heard “this changes everything” a few times. Usually it does change something. The interesting question is how much, and how fast.
Remember the internet?
In the late 1990s, we were told the internet was going to destroy retail. Not disrupt it. Destroy it. Malls would become ghost towns. Main Street was finished. Brick-and-mortar was a dinosaur waiting on the meteor. Within a few years we’d all be shopping from the couch.
That worked out a little differently.
More than 25 years later, e-commerce is about 17% of total U.S. retail sales.¹ So somebody forgot to tell the other 83% they were supposed to go home.
That doesn’t mean the internet wasn’t transformative. It was. Whole categories — books, music, electronics — got turned upside down. And plenty of retailers died. But here’s the distinction that matters:
The internet didn’t kill retail. Failure to adapt killed a lot of retailers.
That’s worth remembering as we listen to the current hysteria about artificial intelligence. Because we’re doing the thing humans are especially good at doing with new technology: taking something real and bolting an absurd prediction onto it.
AI is genuinely powerful. It can write, analyze, summarize, code, translate, and chew through enormous amounts of information in seconds. And because it can do those things, we leap straight to: “Great. Nobody will have a job.”
Apparently the natural next step from “this can help me write an email” is “the human race is unemployed.” Or, if some engineers are correct, “screwed.”
That may be a slight exaggeration.
AI has limitations that get quietly ignored during the impressive demos. It makes things up. It will hand you a confidently wrong answer with a straight face. It struggles with anything genuinely new. And it has no stake in whether that answer ruins your afternoon, costs you money, or creates a mess someone else has to clean up.
It doesn’t lose sleep over that. You do.
But the biggest limitation may have less to do with what the technology can do and more to do with what people actually want.
We don’t buy things purely because they’re efficient. We don’t decide based on information alone. There’s something about judgment, trust, and relationship that never fits neatly on a spreadsheet.
That’s where the AI conversation goes sideways. We keep asking, “What can AI do?” That’s the wrong question. The better one is, “What will people actually want it to do?” Those aren’t the same thing.
The internet could have changed far more of our behavior than it did. But people still like restaurants. They still shop in stores. They still want a human on the phone when something goes wrong — not a chatbot that opens with “I understand how frustrating that must be.”
You don’t, actually. You’re a toaster with a vocabulary.
AI will absolutely change how we work. Some jobs will vanish. Some will shrink. Some will get dramatically more productive. People who learn to use AI will have an edge over people who refuse to. What I question is the certainty about what comes next. The internet taught us something we seem to have forgotten:
A technology can be revolutionary without producing the revolution everyone predicted.
It changed retail. It didn’t eliminate it. AI may change knowledge work, professional services, the shape of the working day. That doesn’t make people suddenly unnecessary. In some corners, the opposite may happen: as the routine work gets automated, the distinctly human parts get more valuable — judgment, creativity, taste, experience, trust, plain common sense. And the ability to look at a confident AI answer and say, “that’s nonsense.”
That last one may turn out to be a real skill.
So I’m not telling you to ignore AI. The opposite. Pay attention. Learn how it works. Use it. Just don’t confuse the speed of the technology with the speed at which human beings actually change.
Which is why I’m skeptical of anyone who tells you, with total confidence, exactly what the world looks like in five or ten years. People are habitual, sentimental, and stubborn — that’s not a bug in humanity, it’s humanity — and it makes us far harder to predict than the technology. They didn’t know in 1999. They don’t know now.
The Wizard, the one in the story about the land of Oz, seemed enormous and terrifying — the smoke, the fire, the booming voice. Pull back the curtain and it’s a man working the levers. AI is a great deal more capable than that man. But the lesson holds: don’t confuse the spectacle with omnipotence.
AI is real. The disruption is real. The opportunity is real. The risk is real. And so is the hype. All of that can be true at once.
So before you quit your job, abandon your profession, or sell your business because someone on television just announced that AI changes everything — take a breath. We’ve heard this before. The internet changed the world. It didn’t end it. I suspect AI will do the same.
The future is coming. It always is. Just don’t assume the man – or the ‘bot – behind the curtain knows exactly what it looks like.
¹ U.S. Census Bureau, Quarterly Retail E-Commerce Sales, Second Quarter 2026 (released August 18, 2026) — 17.1% of total U.S. retail sales, seasonally adjusted. Available at census.gov/retail/ecommerce.html.
