If you have been watching the AI conversation unfold and feeling unsure whether to move quickly or hold back, you are not alone. It is a genuinely confusing time to be making decisions about technology. But there is a framework that can help you get your bearings, and it is older than you might expect.
The technology S-curve
There is a concept I studied at Oxford that I keep coming back to as I watch how AI is developing.
It is called the technology S-curve, developed by Richard Foster and published in his 1986 book Innovation: The Attacker’s Advantage. The idea is straightforward: new technologies do not just appear and immediately become stable, useful, mainstream tools. They go through a period of ferment first, when multiple competing approaches are fighting for position, when the question of which design will win is still genuinely open, and when the gap between the technology’s potential and most organisations’ ability to use it is at its widest.
Once a dominant design emerges and the market consolidates around it, the curve accelerates. Performance improves rapidly. Adoption spreads. The technology becomes embedded in how work gets done. Eventually the curve flattens as the technology reaches its limits, and the conditions are set for the next S-curve to begin.
It is a pattern that has repeated across every significant technology shift of the past fifty years.
Where AI sits right now
AI is in the ferment phase. We are well past the purely experimental stage: this is not a research project. But we have not yet reached what the framework calls dominant design, the point at which a clear standard emerges, uncertainty reduces, and organisations can confidently build around a stable architecture.
You have seen this pattern before.
When mobile technology arrived, the conversation was about disruption. Jobs would disappear. Industries would collapse. What actually happened is that the technology removed friction. It put capability into people’s hands that they would never have had access to before. It made things possible, not just faster.
Cloud followed the same arc. So did the internet before that.
The dominant design moment for mobile came when the app store model, touch interface conventions, and carrier integration became the assumed standard. That was probably 2013 or 2014. We are likely two to four years from an equivalent moment for AI.
How this plays out differently depending on where you sit
What I find genuinely interesting right now is watching AI adoption play out very differently depending on the size and type of organisation.
Large organisations tend to frame AI as a cost story. Efficiency gains. Headcount implications. Return on investment measured against what they can remove. That framing is understandable, but it is also limiting, and in my experience it misses the more significant opportunity. The ferment phase is precisely the time to build capability and position for growth, not just reduce costs.
Small businesses tend to see it differently, and I think they are often more instinctively right about it.
I am based in New Zealand, about an hour and a half outside Wellington. I work with directors and executives in government and large organisations, but I also live in a community of small businesses: shops and service providers in small villages, founders who have big ideas and limited resources, people who have always had the vision but not always had the tools to match it.
The democratisation of AI capability is changing that. For a small business owner, AI is not a cost-saving tool. It is a growth enabler. It lets them do things that would previously have required a team, a budget, or a specialist they could not afford. It compresses the distance between having a good idea and being able to act on it.
I have always believed that you need to spend money to make money. The businesses that will get the most from AI are not the ones asking how to cut costs. They are the ones asking how to grow.
The window is open right now
We are in the ferment phase of a technology that is genuinely significant. The organisations that use this time to build capability, experiment thoughtfully, and position for what comes next will be the ones who benefit most when dominant design arrives.
The pattern is predictable. The outcome is not inevitable. What you do now shapes which side of it you end up on.
The window is open. The question is what you are building while it is.
If you would like to think through what this means for your organisation, I offer a free initial consultation. Book a time here.