If your answer is “NO IDEA” — you might be in the 80% that won’t make it
August 1, 1981. 12:01 AM.
A grainy image flickers onto television screens across America. A woman in a silver dress. A man smashing a radio. And those unforgettable opening synths.
“I heard you on the wireless back in fifty-two…”
MTV had just launched with “Video Killed the Radio Star” by The Buggles — a song about technological disruption that would itself become a symbol of technological disruption.
The irony was lost on radio executives. They laughed it off. “Television is for watching, not listening. Music is our territory. This changes nothing.”
They had no idea.
Within five years, radio stars who couldn’t adapt — who didn’t have the visual presence, the music videos, the new format skills — were gone. Not retired. Gone. The medium had fundamentally shifted, and the only ones who survived were those who’d started preparing before it was obvious.
Here’s the thing: It’s happening again. Right now. To you.
AI Killed the ‘Business as Usual’ Star
There’s no song for it yet. But there should be.
“I heard you on the spreadsheet back in twenty-two… lying awake, thinking gut-feel would see you through…”
The Buggles were onto something. That haunting synth line. The melancholy of progress leaving people behind. The way technology doesn’t ask permission — it just arrives, and suddenly the old way is the dead way.
For decades, small business owners ran on instinct. Gut feel. Experience. You knew your customers. You sensed when to discount. You felt the market shifting.
“And now I understand the problems you can see…”
That era is ending.
Not slowly. Not gradually. Exponentially.
Dario Amodei — CEO of Anthropic, the company building Claude — isn’t sugar-coating it. He told CNN: “AI is getting better than humans at almost all intellectual tasks, and we’re going to collectively, as a society, grapple with it.” His prediction? AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs and spike unemployment to 10-20% within one to five years. Not 2040. Not “eventually.” Starting now.
And here’s what keeps me up at night: according to a 2025 survey, 54% of senior business leaders feel unprepared to navigate AI’s rapid advancement. More than half of the people running companies admit they don’t know what’s coming.
Amodei puts it bluntly: “It’s eerie the extent to which the broader public and politicians, legislators, I don’t think, are fully aware of what’s going on.”
They have no idea.
The Body Count Is Already Mounting
This isn’t theoretical. The casualties are already stacking up.
Call centers: Klarna replaced 700 of their 3,000 customer service agents with AI chatbots in 2024. Brazil’s fintech sector has already automated over 90,000 call center roles. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 25% of all customer service operations will be handled entirely by AI chatbots. One in five customer service leaders have already reduced agent staffing due to AI.
Accountants and bookkeepers: Goldman Sachs identifies accountants and auditors as one of the occupations at highest risk of AI displacement, with industry projections showing 4.5 million accounting and bookkeeping positions eliminated by 2027. AI-powered software already handles financial transactions, reconciles statements, and prepares tax returns faster and more accurately than humans.
Legal assistants and paralegals: AI tools now handle contract analysis, document review, and case outcome prediction. Paralegals face an 80% risk of automation by 2026. Forrester predicts that nearly 80% of jobs in the legal sector will be significantly reshaped by AI.
Data entry clerks: The single largest occupational displacement — 7.5 million positions globally eliminated by 2027. AI systems process over 1,000 documents per hour with error rates under 0.1%, compared to 2-5% for humans.
Administrative assistants: 5 million roles projected to disappear as automation streamlines routine administrative tasks.
Consultants: The professional services sector is being transformed. MIT’s 2025 research found that 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing — but the 5% that succeed? They’re replacing entire consulting engagements.
Retail cashiers: Already feeling the squeeze — 65% of cashier jobs expected to face automation by 2025. Amazon’s cashierless stores were just the beginning.
Let that sink in.
These aren’t predictions about robots in 2050. This is happening right now, in 2025, accelerating into 2027.
The Speed Problem: Your Brain Can’t Keep Up
Here’s why most business owners are caught flat-footed: human brains think linearly. AI grows exponentially.
Amodei again: “When an exponential is moving very quickly, you can’t be sure… I think it is likely enough to happen that we felt there was a need to warn the world about it.”
When you imagine AI progress, you picture a steady climb. A little better this year. A little better next year. Manageable. Predictable.
That’s not what’s happening.
The AI market was valued at $189 billion in 2023. By 2033, it’s projected to hit $4.8 trillion. That’s a 25-fold increase in ten years.
Between 2024 and 2025, professional use of AI tools jumped from 48% to 72%. That’s not incremental growth. That’s a fundamental shift in how work gets done.
OpenAI’s research showed their models more than doubled their “win rate” against human professionals between June 2024 and September 2025. Fifteen months. Doubled.
The radio-to-TV transition took a decade. The newspaper-to-internet shift took fifteen years. The AI transition? It’s happening in months.
Business owners operating on “2025 time” — making plans for next quarter, next year — will wake up in “2027 reality” wondering what happened to their industry.
Data Is AI’s Blood
Here’s the part nobody’s talking about.
Everyone focuses on the AI brain. The ChatGPT. The agents. The automation tools. The shiny front end.
But a brain without blood is just dead tissue.
Data is AI’s circulatory system. It’s what keeps the intelligence alive, fed, functional. Without a constant flow of clean, structured, reliable data, even the most sophisticated AI is useless.
Think about it biologically:
- AI is the brain — powerful, capable, revolutionary potential
- Data is the blood — carries oxygen, nutrients, information to every cell
- Data pipelines are the circulatory system — arteries, veins, capillaries delivering what’s needed, where it’s needed, when it’s needed
A brain without blood flow? That’s a stroke. That’s death.
A business with AI but no data infrastructure? That’s a business ‘heart attack’.
And the statistics prove it:
- 80%+ of AI projects fail (RAND Corporation) — twice the failure rate of non-AI technology projects
- 60% of AI projects will be abandoned by 2026 due to lack of AI-ready data (Gartner)
- 95% of generative AI pilots fail to achieve rapid revenue acceleration (MIT)
- #1 obstacle to AI success: data quality and readiness — cited by 43% of organizations (Informatica)
These aren’t technology failures. They’re circulatory failures. The AI brain was fine. The blood never reached it.
The 2027 ‘Heart Attack’: Mass Cardiac Event Incoming
“Oh-a-oh… we can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far…”
The Buggles knew. Once the shift happens, there’s no going back. No rewind button. No second chance to prepare for what’s already arrived.
Let me paint you a picture.
It’s 2027. AI agents are handling customer service, ad optimization, inventory management, content creation, financial forecasting. Not as experiments. As standard operating procedure.
The businesses that built their data circulatory systems in 2024-2025 are thriving. Their AI has years of clean, complete, first-party data to work with. Every customer interaction, every conversion path, every behaviour pattern — captured, structured, flowing.
They ask their AI questions and get real answers. “Which marketing channels drive the highest lifetime value customers?” Answered in seconds, with confidence, based on complete data.
The businesses that waited?
They’re flatlining.
They bought the AI brain. They never built the blood vessels. Now they’re watching competitors make decisions in seconds that take them weeks. They’re hemorrhaging customers to businesses that know things — because those businesses have data flowing.
How many business ‘heart attacks’ will we see?
Based on current statistics: the majority.
Remember: 42% of companies abandoned most of their AI initiatives in 2025, up from just 17% in 2024. That’s not a trend. That’s an acceleration curve. And it’s pointing straight at businesses who thought they could wait.
The Data Trees You’re Not Planting
“We can’t rewind, we’ve gone too far…”
Here’s the cruel irony of the AI revolution: you can’t backfill data you never collected. There’s no rewind button for information that was never captured.
We call this concept “Data Trees” (coined by Seresa) — and it’s the most important metaphor for understanding what’s actually at stake.
Think about an orchard. If you want to harvest apples in 2027, you needed to plant trees in 2014. You can’t show up in 2027 with a shovel and expect fruit by afternoon.
Data works exactly the same way.
The businesses planting Data Trees today — building systematic data collection infrastructure, capturing every customer interaction, storing clean first-party data in warehouses they control — will harvest years of insights when AI gets sophisticated enough to use them.
The businesses waiting? They’ll show up in 2027 with hungry AI systems and empty warehouses.
Every day you wait to build the pipeline is another day of data you’ll never get back.
Every customer interaction that happens without proper tracking is fruit that will never grow.
Every conversion path you don’t capture is intelligence your AI will never have.
The radio stars who waited until MTV was dominant? Too late. The training ground was gone. The audience had moved on. The data — the experience, the format knowledge, the visual skills — couldn’t be acquired overnight.
Which Star Will You Be?
“Pictures came and broke your heart… put the blame on VCR…”
The radio stars blamed the technology. They blamed MTV. They blamed the audience for wanting something new. But blame doesn’t pay the bills. Blame doesn’t save your business. Blame is what losers do while winners adapt.
Let me take you back to August 1, 1981.
Two radio DJs sit in a studio, watching MTV’s launch on a small television in the corner. “Video Killed the Radio Star” plays.
One laughs, turns back to his microphone: “This changes nothing. Radio is forever. People will always want pure audio.”
One pauses. Thinks. Quietly starts taking notes: “What if they’re right? What do I need to learn? What infrastructure do I need to build? What skills do I need to develop — starting now, while I still have time?”
Five years later, the first DJ is looking for work. The second is hosting a television show.
It’s 2025. AI is playing on every channel.
“Video killed the radio star… Video killed the radio star…”
AI is killing the ‘business as usual’ star. Right now. The question isn’t whether it will happen. It’s whether you’ll be ready when it does.
The question is: will you have blood pumping when the moment arrives?
Building Your Circulatory System
This is what Transmute Engine™ was built for.
Not the AI hype. Not the agent trend. The infrastructure that makes AI actually work.
Every event from your WordPress site — captured server-side, before browsers block it, before privacy tools strip it. Every customer interaction flowing to every destination simultaneously: GA4, Facebook CAPI, Google Ads, BigQuery.
Same data. Same format. Complete picture.
And most importantly: flowing into YOUR BigQuery warehouse. Not Google’s. Not Meta’s. Yours. Every interaction, every conversion path, every piece of the puzzle — sitting in infrastructure you control, ready to feed whatever AI tools you deploy today or discover in 2027.
Data Trees you plant today. Harvest you’ll reap for years.
A circulatory system that keeps your AI brain alive.
The infrastructure that separates businesses with a pulse from businesses flatlining.
Build your Data Trees. Get your blood pumping. Be the DJ who saw it coming.
Learn More About Transmute Engine™ → Start planting today — free trial available.
P.S. Wondering what happens when AI sits down to dinner and finds nothing on its plate? We explored that hungry scenario in Who Stole AI’s Dinner? — the uncomfortably relatable tale of AI starvation.
P.P.S. Already convinced you need a pipeline but worried about the complexity? Read why we built a PIPE you’ll never smoke — infrastructure so valuable you’ll never want to eliminate it.
