CONCEPT
Interprofessional Competition
Abbott’s insight that AI does not merely create new entrants within a single profession but dissolves the boundaries between professions entirely—triggering a competition not between traditional and AI-augmented practitioners of the same field, but between entire adjacent professional groups newly capable of claiming each other’s jurisdiction.
When a product manager can produce working software, and a designer can implement features end to end, and a marketing specialist can build analytical tools, the jurisdictional boundaries separating these roles are breached simultaneously—not sequentially, not gradually, but all at once.
Andrew Abbott observed that most analyses of AI disruption focus on the displacement of individual workers or the automation of individual tasks, missing the relevant unit of analysis: the
competitive ecology of professional groups vying for jurisdiction over specific kinds of work. AI does not merely enable new entrants within a single profession to challenge its established practitioners. It enables practitioners from entirely adjacent professions to claim jurisdiction over work that was previously gated by skills they never needed to develop. This is interprofessional competition—competition not between software developers using AI and software developers without it, but between software developers and the product managers, designers, domain experts, and small-business