07 January 2026
Supermarkets, the internet, and AI, disruption isn’t new, but investor memory often is. Every market cycle tells us the same story, but in a different language:
· AI is coming for white-collar jobs.
· Climate policy is rewriting industrial strategy.
· Supply chains are being redrawn.
· Data is the new oil.
But before all this, there were supermarkets, and before that, the internet.
What these transformations have in common isn’t just scale - it’s our tendency to treat each one as unprecedented. In reality, deep, systemic change happens more often than we admit; we just forget how disruptive the last wave was.
It’s hard to overstate how transformational the rise of supermarkets was in post-war Britain. What began as a shift in food retail quickly became a reordering of logistics, labour, and community life. Corner shops, butchers, fishmongers and grocers didn’t just lose market share - they lost their role as neighbourhood anchors.
Supermarkets didn’t just undercut prices; they centralised distribution, standardised choice, and industrialised margins. Entire categories of skilled labour disappeared, replaced by checkout systems and supply chain optimisation. Retailers that couldn’t match scale economics were either bought out, shrank to a niche, or vanished altogether.
But what felt like a disruptive threat in the 1960s and ’70s is now infrastructure. Few think of supermarkets as “technology” anymore, but they were. Their business models depended on innovations in cold storage, inventory management, and procurement software long before “tech-enabled” became a buzzword.
However, once disruption becomes embedded, we stop calling it disruption.
Fast-forward to the mid-1990s. The internet was billed as revolutionary, and it was. But its early years were marked by overconfidence, irrational valuations, and infrastructure that couldn’t yet support the promise. The dot-com crash reset expectations.
Yet out of the wreckage emerged the firms and models that would reshape the global economy. Logistics, banking, media, and retail all moved online, and new categories of consumer behaviour formed - from e-commerce to digital banking to on-demand everything.
What made the difference wasn’t just technology, but operational adaptability. The winners didn’t talk about “change” - they embedded it. Amazon was not the first online retailer, but it scaled the back-end logistics and customer experience in ways that competitors couldn’t match.
By the mid-2000s, digital transformation was no longer news - it was assumed. Another cycle of significant change had been normalised.
Now we’re in the middle of another cycle. Artificial intelligence is everywhere and nowhere. It headlines boardroom discussions, dominates product roadmaps, and fuels fears of job automation and social instability.
But from an investment perspective, it’s following a familiar pattern: initial hype, broad misunderstanding, and real long-term impact.
Like supermarkets and the internet before it, AI is recasting how value is delivered. In professional services, firms are using it to automate low-margin tasks, generate content, extract insight, and improve service speed. Others are resisting or still clinging to the idea that trust or human nuance will protect their margins indefinitely.
That may be true in part. But if history is any guide, the firms that integrate AI early - not as a tool, but as an operating model - will outlast those that treat it as optional.
There’s a behavioural blind spot here, because when change hits, it feels unique, more complex, more uncertain, more destabilising than what came before. But the truth is: the economy is in constant motion. Structural change is not rare, it’s routine.
Each cycle brings discomfort:
· Supermarkets felt impersonal.
· The internet felt insecure.
· AI feels abstract.
However, all three have delivered productivity gains, cost deflation, and new business models. Significantly, each one shifted where margins sit and what counts as differentiation.
For investors, the danger isn’t just missing the upside; it’s misreading the timeline. We panic at the peak of hype, and then grow bored by the time the fundamental transformation arrives. What feels obvious in hindsight was rarely obvious in real time.
History shows the market rewards those who can anticipate disruption. However, it consistently punishes those who overreact to the noise and ignore the deeper signals.
If there’s one lesson from the rise of supermarkets, the spread of the internet, and the emergence of AI, it’s this: true disruption doesn’t announce itself with fireworks. It starts quietly, grows steadily, and then one day feels inevitable.
Savvy investors don’t just follow the trend, they ask:
· What changes will look obvious in five years?
· Who’s embedding this now rather than reacting later?
· And where will pricing power shift next?
This has all happened before, and it will happen again. The question isn’t whether change is coming - it’s whether you’re prepared to see it clearly.
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