The disruption and the opportunity are the same event: what the smartphone taught me about AI

When I was nineteen, I got the first job I ever truly loved.

I was a photographer at Kiddie Kandids. I'd gotten pregnant right out of high school, so instead of heading off to college I went straight into the workforce with a brand-new baby, almost no life experience, and the very adult problem of having to support two people. That studio job felt like a door opening. For the first time I could see a future where I made a living doing something I was good at, something I enjoyed. I wasn't just earning a paycheck. I was becoming someone.

And I was good at it. I moved up. I managed multiple stores. I trained the teams that opened new ones. Lifetouch eventually recruited me to run a portrait studio inside Target. On the side, I poured my own money into the craft: a Nikon D3, a bag of lenses, professional lighting, a printer, somewhere around $30,000 of equipment all told. I built a freelance business that, at its peak, earned about as much as my full-time studio salary. I was a working artist and a single mom making it work. I was proud of that. I still am.

So when smartphones first showed up, I wasn't worried. I had held a real camera. I knew what a professional lens could do that a phone couldn't. The early point-and-shoots were getting better, the phones were improving, but the quality difference was obvious to anyone who knew what they were looking at. People will always need someone who can do it right, I thought. They'll always want the good version.

I was standing in the middle of the forest, and all I could see were trees.

What I couldn't see from inside it

Here's what I know now that I couldn't have told you then.

The thing I got wrong wasn't about quality. I was right about quality. A phone in 2010 genuinely couldn't match my Nikon. What I got wrong was assuming that quality was what people were buying. It wasn't. Most people were buying the moment. And the second they could capture the moment themselves, for free, in their pocket, "good enough" beat "excellent" almost every time.

I watched it happen in real time without understanding what I was watching. Customers started asking for lower prices for the same work. Then lower again. The freelance jobs got harder to justify for the hours they took. In the studios, the sales goals started to feel less like targets and more like fantasies. The work people wanted got cheaper, faster, less artistic. I could feel the craft draining out of the job I loved, until one day I realized I had a choice to make. I could become an order-taker who happened to hold a camera, or I could hang up my hat and protect photography as the thing I loved instead of letting it curdle into a thing I resented.

What I didn't grasp was that I wasn't living through a me problem. I was living through an industry problem, and the industry was already a dead company walking.

Look at the timeline I lived through without seeing it. Smartphone ownership in the U.S. went from about a third of adults to nearly everyone over the following decade. Worldwide, shipments of dedicated cameras eventually fell roughly 94 percent from their 2010 peak. The number of photos people took didn't shrink. It exploded into the trillions, with smartphones now capturing about 94 percent of them. Almost none of those photos went through someone like me anymore. Kiddie Kandids, the chain I started at, had filed for bankruptcy in early 2010 and closed nearly 200 stores. Olan Mills, an eighty-year-old institution, sold itself off in 2011, and its family said out loud that cell phones were a big part of why. Kodak, of all companies, filed for bankruptcy in 2012, the same year a two-year-old phone app called Instagram sold for a billion dollars. The film giant that defined a century of memories was worth less than a photo-sharing app that ran on the device replacing it.

Then, in 2013, came the part that should have been visible from space. CPI Corp shut down more than 2,000 portrait studios inside Sears and Walmart, almost overnight, and laid off more than 4,300 people. A company that had been photographing American families for sixty years just stopped. Not because of one bad quarter. Because the reason to drive to the mall for a portrait had quietly evaporated years earlier, and the institution was the last to find out.

I had left photography in 2012. I took a pay cut and went to work in a call center, trading the stress of an unsustainable craft for something stable. I told myself I was being practical. What I was doing, though I wouldn't have said it this way, was getting out of the forest about a year before the fire reached the studios I used to run.

I didn't see it coming. I felt it coming, in my sales numbers and my shrinking margins, and I got lucky enough to move. But I was reacting. I never once stepped back and saw the whole shape of what was happening until it was already history.

This time I'd like to do better than lucky.

I've seen this forest before

I'm not in photography anymore. Over the last decade and more I clawed my way up: call center rep, then team leader, then user researcher, then product owner, the person who decides what software gets built and why. I went back and did some college for software development. I earned certifications. I rebuilt myself into a technical professional, the kind of knowledge worker the last twenty years told us was the safe place to be.

And now the company I work for is bringing in AI, and I am getting the strangest feeling of déjà vu.

Because I know this feeling. I know what it is like to stand inside an industry that is quietly, structurally changing underneath you while everyone around you debates whether the new thing is "really as good" as what the professionals do. I had that exact debate about smartphone cameras in 2010, and I lost it. Not because I was wrong about the technology, but because I was asking the wrong question.

So let me tell you what the trees look like to me right now, and then let me tell you why I'm more excited than scared.

The parallels are almost uncomfortably clean. The iPhone launched in 2007. ChatGPT launched, free to anyone, in late 2022. The smartphone took about thirteen years to get into nearly every adult's hands. AI is moving faster. About a third of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT already, roughly double the share two years earlier, and a majority of Americans now say they bump into AI several times a week. ChatGPT reportedly reached 100 million users in about two months, a milestone TikTok needed about nine months and Instagram about two and a half years to reach. The money pouring into the infrastructure is historic: the biggest tech companies spent something approaching half a trillion dollars in a single year building it. And the first job casualties are showing up the way you would expect. Companies attributed roughly 55,000 layoffs to AI in 2025, and by early 2026 AI had become the single most-cited reason for cuts in a given month.

If you laid the smartphone era and the AI era side by side and asked me where we are right now, here is my answer: we're somewhere around 2011 or 2012. We are at the Kodak moment, the first bankruptcies, the first billion-dollar new entrants, the loud predictions on both sides, but we have not yet had the 2013 moment. We have not yet watched a Sears-portrait-studios-sized institution wink out overnight because the reason for its existence quietly left the building years before. That part, if the pattern holds, hasn't happened yet.

Which means, unlike last time, some of us are standing in the forest early enough to look up.

The businesses that don't know they're in trouble yet

Here's the uncomfortable thing I keep thinking about. In 2010, if you had walked into the studio where I worked and told the manager that the whole company would be gone in a few years, killed by a phone, they would have laughed at you. We had locations. We had contracts. We had a name families trusted. We were busy. Right up until we weren't.

There are companies and small businesses operating today with that same confidence, and some of them are already walking dead. They just haven't gotten the memo. I'd gently suggest that if your business runs on a task a capable person with an AI tool can now do at "good enough" quality for a fraction of the price, you are closer to 2011 than you think. The pattern isn't "AI does it better than your best people." The pattern is the one that got photography: the customer decides good-enough-and-cheap beats excellent-and-expensive, and once they decide that, the floor under your pricing falls out and doesn't come back.

The work most exposed is the standardized, repeatable, mid-skill kind, the sort of thing that used to require a trained human and now mostly requires good judgment about an AI's output. If you run a small agency, a back-office service, a high-volume content shop, a routine-document business, the question to ask isn't "can AI do my job as well as I can?" The question that quietly killed the portrait studio was deadlier: has my customer stopped needing the premium version?

And then there are people like me, the salaried employees, the ones who did everything right and reskilled into the supposedly safe jobs. I'd be lying if I pretended my own role is untouchable. The forecasters are all over the map. Goldman Sachs says something like 300 million jobs worldwide are exposed to AI. The IMF says it could touch 40 percent of jobs globally and 60 percent in wealthy economies. Some AI executives predicted that half of entry-level office jobs could vanish, though several of them have since walked those warnings back. Meanwhile the real employment data hasn't moved much yet, and serious economists warn that a lot of "we cut jobs because of AI" is ordinary cost-cutting wearing a futuristic costume.

That contradiction, scary headlines and calm data, is the single most important thing to understand, because it is exactly what 2011 felt like in photography. The bankruptcies had started, but the official labor numbers hadn't caught up. The collapse was real and invisible at the same time. If you waited for the data to tell you it was time to move, you were already standing inside CPI Corp on the day they turned off the lights.

So I'm not waiting for the data this time. I'm treating the feeling, the one I ignored in 2010, as the signal.

Why I'm optimistic anyway

If I stopped here, this would be another doom article, and the internet has plenty of those. I want to tell you the part nobody seems to want to lead with: the smartphone didn't just destroy. It created, wildly and abundantly, in ways almost nobody predicted from inside 2007.

Go back and look at what that disruption spawned. The App Store opened in 2008 with 500 apps. By 2022 it had paid developers more than $320 billion. A whole job that didn't exist, "app developer," became a career for millions. One developer made a game called Flappy Bird in about three days, and it earned around $50,000 a day before he pulled it. Two founders put a card reader in a phone's headphone jack, and suddenly the farmers-market vendor, the freelance hairstylist, and yes, the freelance photographer could take a credit card. That company grew into a multi-billion-dollar business by enabling small businesses, not replacing them. The creator economy, people earning a living from a phone camera and an audience, is now estimated at around 50 million people worldwide. About 16 percent of American adults have earned money through a gig platform that didn't exist before the smartphone. People turned their cars, their closets, their spare time, and their skills into income that was simply impossible to earn in 2006.

Here's the part that hits home for me. The same disruption that ended my photography career is the reason the freelance photographer who came after me can book clients through an app, take payment on her phone, build an audience online, and run a real one-person business with tools I would have killed for. The number of photography businesses in this country went up even as the big chains died. The work didn't disappear. It scattered, transformed, and re-formed around the people who saw where it was going.

That is the forest I couldn't see in 2010, and it is the one I'm staring straight at now.

Because every one of those openings came from the same place: somebody asked what does this new tool make newly possible? instead of what is this new tool going to take from me? The losers in the smartphone transition asked the second question. The winners asked the first. The portrait studio asked how to protect its pricing. The kid building apps in his bedroom asked what he could make now that he couldn't make before.

So what's the AI version of the app developer, the card reader, the creator economy? I don't know yet. Nobody does, the same way nobody in 2008 could have drawn you a map to the modern gig economy. But I can see the shape of it. The barrier to entry on whole skill sets is collapsing. In one large study, an AI assistant made customer-service workers about 14 percent more productive, and the least experienced workers improved by about 34 percent, nearly catching up to the veterans. AI can be a great equalizer for the beginner. "Vibe coding," building real software by describing what you want in plain English, was named a word of the year. People with no formal training are launching products. One text-to-app company became worth more than a billion dollars about eight months after launch.

Translate that out of tech-speak and it means something hopeful: the person who learns to direct these tools well can now do things that used to require a whole team, a degree, or a decade of experience. The same force that threatens the standardized mid-skill job is handing real power to the individual willing to pick up the tool and point it somewhere useful.

How I'm playing it this time

I'm not going to be reactive again. I'm not going to wait until my sales goals feel impossible and my margins are gone. Here's what seeing the forest looks like for me, in practice, and maybe some of it is useful to you.

I'm learning the tools on purpose. When phones came for photography, I treated the new technology as my enemy and clung to the old way. This time I'm doing the opposite. I'm becoming the person who knows how to use AI well, because the research is clear that the people who direct these tools come out ahead of the people who ignore them. I refuse to be the one defending the darkroom while everyone else goes digital.

I'm building on the side now, while I'm still stable, not after. The mistake I made last time was waiting until photography became unsustainable before I moved. The smarter move is to plant the seeds while you still have a paycheck and the room to experiment. The smartphone era rewarded the people who started building in 2009, not the ones who panicked in 2013.

I've got a fallback that's hard for AI to touch. I've deliberately put myself near work that's harder to automate, the hands-on, physical, human-judgment kind the forecasters keep saying is the least exposed. You don't have to bet your whole future on staying ahead of the curve if you also have a foothold somewhere the curve can't easily reach.

And I'm asking the right question this time. Not what AI is going to take from me, but what AI makes newly possible that I'm well placed to do. I spent fifteen years becoming someone who understands customers, products, and now technology. That combination, pointed the right way, is a business.

The moment, not the loss

I lost a career I loved to a piece of technology I underestimated. I won't pretend that didn't hurt, or that the move was painless, or that everyone swept up in it landed on their feet. Some didn't. That's real, and a hopeful outlook isn't the same as a naive one.

But here's what I've earned the right to say, having been inside one of these before: the disruption and the opportunity are the same event. They are not two separate things happening at different times. The smartphone that ended the portrait studio is the same smartphone that created the app developer, the phone-based small business, and the freelancer who's thriving today. You don't get one without the other. The only variable, the only one that's truly in your control, is which side of it you decide to stand on.

In 2010 I was a tree, surrounded by trees, certain the forest would always look the way it did.

This time I'm standing on a hill, and I can finally see the whole thing: the part that's burning, and the new growth coming up right behind it.

This time, I'm planting early.

Sources

• U.S. smartphone ownership, 35 percent in 2011 to 91 percent (Pew Research Center)
• Dedicated camera shipments down about 94 percent from their 2010 peak, from CIPA data (PetaPixel)
• About 2.1 trillion photos taken in 2025, roughly 94 percent on smartphones (PetaPixel)
• Kiddie Kandids bankruptcy and store closures, January 2010 (Deseret News)
• Olan Mills sold to Lifetouch in 2011, with the family citing cell phones (Chattanooga Times Free Press)
• Kodak's January 2012 bankruptcy (ABC News)
• Facebook's 1 billion dollar purchase of Instagram, April 2012 (Meta)
• CPI Corp closing more than 2,000 Sears and Walmart portrait studios, with more than 4,300 jobs lost, in 2013 (NPR)
• About 34 percent of U.S. adults have used ChatGPT, roughly double the 2023 share (Pew Research Center)
• 62 percent of Americans interact with AI at least several times a week (Pew Research Center)
• ChatGPT's estimated 100 million users in about two months, per UBS and Similarweb (The Guardian)
• Big-tech AI capital spending of roughly 448 billion dollars in 2025 (CNBC)
• About 55,000 U.S. layoffs attributed to AI in 2025, with AI the top cited reason by early 2026 (Challenger, Gray & Christmas)
• Goldman Sachs estimate that AI could expose about 300 million jobs (CNBC)
• IMF estimate of about 40 percent of jobs globally and 60 percent in advanced economies (CNBC)
• Dario Amodei's entry-level jobs warning, and the later walk-backs (Axios and Fortune)
• No significant aggregate labor-market shift yet in AI-exposed work (The Budget Lab at Yale)
• An AI assistant raising support-worker productivity about 14 percent, and about 34 percent for novices (National Bureau of Economic Research)
• The App Store opening in 2008 with 500 apps, and 320 billion dollars paid to developers by 2022 (Apple, via TechCrunch)
• Flappy Bird, built in about three days, earning around 50,000 dollars a day (ABC News)
• Square's headphone-jack card reader and its rise (CNBC)
• A creator economy of about 50 million people worldwide (Goldman Sachs)
• About 16 percent of U.S. adults have earned money on a gig platform (Pew Research Center)
• The number of U.S. photography businesses rising in the smartphone era (IBISWorld)
• "Vibe coding," 2025 Word of the Year (Collins Dictionary)
• A text-to-app startup (Lovable) reaching a billion-dollar valuation about eight months after launch (TechCrunch)