That is why one international business school has come up with an inaugural ranking of the disruptive potential of various tech.

Based on a survey of 1,000 professionals across eleven industries on the trends of AI (including generative AI [GenAI]), an international French business school has drawn on its academic heritage* to produce an annual ranking checklist for evaluating technology disruption.

Survey details are forthcoming, but the methodology behind the ranking checklist involves combining academic and patent citation volume, trend analysis, and qualitative expert input to help users determine how disruptive a particular technology in.

In the case of GenAI, the ranking evaluates this technology with a disruption score of 89.45/100, with the authors citing rapid growth in publications and perceived transformative potential.

Other disruption ranking aspects

Based on the same data, the ranking methodology has rated Descriptive AI (traditional machine learning and analytics) as the most deeply embedded technology in business processes, despite lower media attention. Also:

  • The technology for renewable energy and storage was accorded a ranking of 40.42/100, based on the premise that energy availability is a new bottleneck for innovation.
  • Quantum computing ranks 32.47/100, with a large share of professionals expressing uncertainty about its near-term impact.
  • Blockchain has been ranked lowest at 12.04/100, with authors asserting that its real-world impact lags behind professional expectations, despite renewed interest in cryptocurrencies.
  • In actual industry data analyzed, the methodology has noted that the automotive sector had displayed the most skepticism towards emerging technologies. The real estate sector data showed high enthusiasm towards energy technologies that had surpassed that of the energy sector itself. Also, data from the luxury sector had showed ambivalence toward GenAI, considering it both the most positively and most negatively disruptive technology, with very few neutral opinions.

According to Jan Ondrus, Professor of Information Systems, ESSEC Business School, the institution proffering the ranking checklist, this non-commercial ranking system can help industry stakeholders to “precisely understand the impact of each technology by sector, while ensuring comparability between them and from year to year…  an objective reference framework to track the evolution of technological disruptions over time.”

*including patent filings, academic publications, and interviews with selected experts on the topic