Blockbuster Had Great Customer Service Too

Imagine it's 2005. AI has just arrived, but Netflix hasn't been invented yet. You still go to Blockbuster on a Friday night. You wander the aisles, pick up cases, read the backs, put them down again. Now imagine someone puts an AI screen in the entrance. It knows your rental history, your preferences, your mood. It recommends exactly the right film, every time. No more wandering. No more dud picks. The Blockbuster experience just got dramatically better. That's AI deployed inside Blockbuster. And it's genuinely useful. Better than wandering the aisles. Probably saves you 15 minutes. But you'd still choose Netflix. The industry is building AI screens for Blockbuster Look at what's happening in adviser tech right now. AI note-takers that produce better meeting summaries. AI compliance tools that check documents faster. AI report writers that draft suitability letters in minutes instead of hours. Every single one of these is an AI screen in the entrance of Blockbuster. Each one makes the existing experience measurably better. Each one solves a real problem. Each one is genuinely impressive technology. And each one is deployed inside the old paradigm. The fragmented, disconnected, bolt-it-on model that the industry has been building for twenty years. Better Blockbuster. Not Netflix. The question advisers should be asking isn't "which AI note-taker is best?" It's "where's my Netflix?" Sustaining versus disruptive Clayton Christensen drew this distinction decades ago. Sustaining innovation makes the existing model better. Disruptive innovation builds a different model entirely. Sustaining innovation in adviser tech: faster compliance checking, smarter document generation, better meeting summaries. All valuable. All improving the current experience. All keeping you inside the same paradigm. Disruptive innovation: a single platform where AI can reason across the complete client relationship - the record, the meetings, the documents, the compliance framework, the investment philosophy, the marketing, the client portal - simultaneously, because it was all built as one system. These are categorically different things. One is a better version of what you already have. The other is something you can't replicate by improving what you already have, no matter how much you spend. "It doesn't work" We spoke to a firm recently. Directly authorised. 270+ active households. Around £80 million under advice. Young client bank, average age under 50. Two advisers, five support staff. Mid-succession, founder retiring, two partners buying in with a 15-to-20-year growth plan ahead of them. They'd done everything right by the old model's logic. Invested properly. Chose the best tool for each job. Built what the industry would call a best-of-breed tech stack. Their conclusion? In their own words: "I've got best of breed now and it doesn't work." Not "it's suboptimal." Not "it could be better." It doesn't work. Multiple workflow options, none of them talking to each other. No single version of truth. Not enough resource to run the current system the way it needs to be run. And a 15-year growth plan that couldn't possibly scale on the current foundations. This firm didn't arrive at that conclusion because someone sold them on a new platform. They arrived at it independently, from the inside, having lived the reality of best-of-breed for years. That's the most powerful evidence there is. Not a vendor saying the old model is broken. A firm that invested in the old model discovering it for themselves. The compounding problem Here's why the gap between Blockbuster and Netflix widens over time, and why this matters more than most firms realise. In a unified platform, data compounds. More clients generate more data. More data makes the AI smarter. Smarter AI delivers better outcomes. Better outcomes attract more clients. In a fragmented stack, data dissipates. It's spread across six systems, filtered through integrations, duplicated inconsistently, and accessible to no single intelligence. The AI in system A can't learn from what happened in system B. Every tool is an island. The firm that moves first doesn't just get a better experience today. They get a compounding advantage that deepens with every client, every meeting, every document, every interaction. The moat gets wider every month. The firm that waits doesn't just miss the improvement. They fall further behind with every month they stay in the old paradigm, because the gap is accelerating, not static. You could deploy the greatest technology in the world This is the thing that's hard to hear. You could deploy the greatest piece of technology ever built. The most sophisticated AI, the most elegant interface, the most powerful automation. But if you deploy it inside the old paradigm - the fragmented stack, the disconnected tools, the bolted-on architecture - where is it going to go? It'll make Blockbuster slightly better. It won't build Netflix. Netflix wasn't a better video shop. It was the realisation that the video shop was the wrong model entirely. The content was valuable. The delivery mechanism was the constraint. Financial advice is valuable. The delivery mechanism - the fragmented, siloed, bolt-it-on tech stack - is the constraint. AI doesn't fix the constraint. AI makes the constraint more visible, because now you can see exactly how much potential is being wasted by architecture that can't support it. The honest question Blockbuster had great customer service. Friendly staff who knew your name and your taste. A pleasant experience, genuinely. If you'd surveyed customers in 2004, most would have said they were happy. They were happy with the experience. They just didn't know the alternative existed yet. The advisers who are happy with their current stack aren't wrong. The tools work. The AI is impressive. The experience is better than it was two years ago. But better than two years ago and good enough for the next fifteen years are very different standards. And the firms planning for the next fifteen years - the ones mid-succession, the ones with growth plans, the ones thinking about scale - are starting to realise that making Blockbuster better isn't the same as building what comes next.