Remember the era when America Online CDs flooded mailboxes and "You've got mail" felt revolutionary? The internet did transform work dramatically, but not in the ways most experts predicted during the late 1990s. According to Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, the real story wasn't just about CEOs in hoodies or armies of coders, but about barbers adopting online booking, nurses embracing telehealth, and the explosion of delivery jobs.
The Unpredicted Transformation
The late 1990s brimmed with contradictory predictions about the internet's impact on employment. Some promised instant transformation while others dismissed the hype as mere bubble talk. Both camps turned out to be partially right and partially wrong. The internet proved more transformative than skeptics believed, yet its effects on jobs arrived more slowly and in more unexpected places than enthusiasts forecast.
If you were only looking for a sudden surge of "internet jobs," you missed the bigger picture: The internet quietly infiltrated nearly every occupation and rewired how work was performed. This transformation wasn't painless—while the internet wasn't a massive job killer overall, certain occupations faced dramatic declines.
Jobs That Disappeared and Those That Endured
The number of travel agents plummeted as booking moved online. Meter readers vanished as utilities digitized. Other declines continue unfolding: Counter-clerk employment dropped by 30% between 2015 and 2023 as kiosks and apps took over, while telemarketer jobs fell by 75% as the web provided new outreach channels.
Why did the same technology erase some roles but spare others? The answer lies in what jobs are fundamentally made of. Travel agents focused primarily on booking, meter readers mainly read meters, and telemarketers made calls—all routine, digitizable tasks that the internet could directly substitute. However, most jobs aren't built around single, routine tasks. Occupations like finance managers or plumbers represent bundles of judgment, coordination, and hands-on work. The internet could replace some tasks within these bundles but couldn't substitute for the entire occupation.
The Quiet Revolution Across Industries
The more significant story has been additive. In 1998, few could imagine social media—let alone 65,000 social-media managers—and 200,000 information-security analysts would have sounded absurd when data still lived on floppy disks. More importantly, nearly every job in the economy underwent quiet transformation. Today, just 10% of workers make minimal use of the internet—roles like butchers and carpet installers.
The changes extended far beyond white-collar work. Dental-lab technicians shifted from manual molds to digital scanning and CAD/CAM technology. Etchers and engravers moved from hand tools to digital engraving. These were silent revolutions happening far from the spotlight.
The transformation occurred in stages. Email, shared calendars, and CRMs initially sped up familiar tasks without changing who did what. Outlook replaced inbox trays; shared drives replaced file rooms. Then workflows began changing fundamentally. Marketing shifted from campaign bursts to always-on funnels and A/B testing. Clinics embedded e-prescribing and patient portals, reshaping front-office and clinical handoffs.
What Internet History Teaches Us About AI
This historical pattern provides crucial insights for understanding AI's likely impact. Our mental model often defaults to an industrial image—John Henry versus the steam drill—where jobs consist of one dominant task and automation maps one-to-one. The internet revealed a different reality: Modern roles are complex bundles of tasks. Technologies typically affect routine tasks first, then workflows, and only later reshape entire jobs, with second-order hiring around the technological backbone.
AI fits this pattern more than it breaks it. Large language models can draft briefs, summarize medical notes, and answer queries—important tasks, but still parts of larger roles. They don't manage risk, hold accountability, reassure anxious clients, or integrate messy context across teams. Expect a rebalanced division of labor: The technical layer becomes faster and cheaper while the human layer shifts toward supervision, coordination, complex judgment, relationship work, and exception handling.
What we should anticipate from AI is messy, uneven reshuffling in stages. Some roles will contract sharply, affecting real people and livelihoods. But many occupations will be rewired in quieter ways. Productivity gains will unlock new demand and create work that doesn't exist today, alongside a build-out around data, safety, compliance, and infrastructure.
AI is unprecedented, but so was the internet. The real risk lies in timing: overestimating immediate job losses while underestimating the long, quiet rewiring already underway and overlooking the jobs created in the technological backbone. That was the internet's enduring lesson—and it's likely to be AI's as well.
