The Seventh Wave: How AI Will Change The Technology Industry
Forrester, Wednesday, July 2nd, 2025
My professional career has spanned six major tech changes: minicomputer, PC, internet, social, mobile, and cloud. Each of these revolutions brought a wave of new providers and destroyed swaths of legacy companies.
Now comes the Seventh Wave of major tech change, driven by AI in its modern forms - generative and agentic.
In the '80s and '90s, when faced with a new wave, the legacy tech companies would freeze in the headlights or double down on their suddenly obsolete business models. This allowed new players to gain traction and redefine industries. So the mainframe players largely crumbled in the face of minicomputers, and the minicomputer industry was decimated by the PC. Executives back then were not learning-mindset thinkers, and they defaulted to stonewalling and then responding, but too late. Yes, Wang Laboratories and Digital Equipment did build PCs, but the new market had already been formed. Schumpeterian creative destruction held court.