I do not think most industries understand how category collapse actually feels while it is happening.

People imagine dramatic moments.

A market crash.
Mass layoffs.
Some public announcement that tells everyone the world changed.

But most systems die quietly at first.

A company stops renewing software contracts because the workflow no longer matters.

A role disappears after someone leaves and nobody gets rehired.

A smaller competitor suddenly moves much faster because they removed layers of coordination entirely.

At first, these things look isolated.

Then eventually the pattern becomes impossible to ignore.

I think that is the dangerous part about infrastructure shifts.

Once the underlying system changes, adaptation stops feeling strategic and starts feeling mandatory. Companies do not adopt because they are visionary. They adopt because competitors force them to.

And markets rarely move politely once that pressure starts building.

The market compresses time.

What looked optional one year suddenly becomes survival the next.

I also think many people still assume there will be equivalent replacement work waiting on the other side of this transition because that is what happened during earlier waves of automation.

But coordination becoming infrastructure feels different.

If the underlying need disappears, the market does not need the same number of people anymore because the category itself shrinks.

Especially in industries built around maintaining systems that newer infrastructure increasingly absorbs automatically.

And I think many companies are still making the same mistake incumbents always make during transitions like this.

They mistake current revenue for long term relevance.

Most companies still think category collapse announces itself early enough for them to react.

Markets rarely give that kind of warning.