PERSON
Michael B. Horn
Co-founder of the Christensen Institute and the author whose 2024 reframing — "it doesn't make much sense to talk about GenAI as being disruptive in and of itself" — clarified how Christensen's framework applies to the AI transition.
Michael B. Horn is an American education and technology analyst, author, and co-founder of the Christensen Institute. Trained at Yale University and Harvard Business School, where he studied under Clayton Christensen, Horn co-authored Disrupting Class (2008) with Christensen and Curtis Johnson — the book that applied the disruption framework to K-12 education and predicted the eventual transformation of schooling by modular learning technologies. Since 2022, Horn has emerged as the most prominent institutional voice applying Christensen's frameworks to generative AI, distinguishing sustaining from disruptive AI applications and insisting that business models, not technologies, determine whether AI produces displacement or amplification.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Horn's central contribution to the AI discourse is his insistence on analytical precision about what disruption actually means. In a widely cited 2024 Christensen Institute essay, Horn argued that many observers misuse the term 'disruption' to mean 'rapid change' or 'significant impact,' losing the structural specificity that makes