Written in December 2025, arguing that AI-driven disruption would land somewhere different from where the headlines were pointing. It is republished here as a forecast that has continued to hold up, not as a settled conclusion drawn after the fact.
Itwerx is a service-disabled veteran-owned managed IT provider serving Seattle-area businesses, founded in 2005, and the past year of that work has run largely through the kind of process bottlenecks described below.
The argument, as it was made
The news at the time was full of Fortune 500 layoffs and hiring freezes attributed to AI, some of them later reversed after the deployments underperformed. The post argued that framing missed where the larger effect would actually show up: not primarily as job elimination, but as growth inside small and mid-sized businesses that could not previously afford it.
Growth is expensive and risky for a small company. Consultants are one traditional way to buy capability, and they are reliably costly and not reliably effective. Off-the-shelf systems for marketing, fulfillment and admin work carry the same problem: real cost, uneven results, and knock-on effects that can undercut the benefit. The post’s claim was that AI, applied at the right points in a process rather than bolted on as a chatbot, could deliver a version of that capability at a fraction of the cost.
It named four categories it expected to feel this first: consulting, SaaS, industry-specific niche applications, and software development generally.
Where that forecast stands now
The categories named have not been abstract. The work published since on this site is an example of exactly the pattern described: rebuilding a sales process at its actual bottleneck rather than adding a chatbot on top of it, replacing custom software that would once have needed a developer, mining a company’s own email for what it already knows, and building a KPI dashboard without procuring a SaaS platform to do it. None of that was written to prove the forecast. It is what the same client work looked like once the forecast was made.
The underlying point is not that AI eliminates jobs. It is that the companies applying it well are keeping their people and using AI to remove the speed bumps around them, which is a very different disruption story than the one that leads most headlines.
Itwerx Corp is a service-disabled veteran-owned small business providing IT services across Seattle, Bellevue, Everett and Snohomish County. This is the kind of thing our AI integration work deals with – talk to us about yours.
