Looking Beyond the Tech: How to Spot the Whitespace in Emerging Technology Waves
Looking past the hype to find the strategic market shifts that drive real value.
Every time a new general-purpose technology (GPT) lands, whether it's the steam engine, the internet, or now, generative AI, the immediate instinct is to chase the tech itself. Build with it. Integrate it. Monetize it. However, history tells a more interesting story: the biggest wins usually go not to those who build the tech, but to those who notice how it changes the game around them.
What happens when the landscape changes and we only pay attention to the shiny object in the middle? In this piece, I want to explore what I call the "whitespace"—the structural, behavioral, and economic shifts that surround a new GPT. If you're a product leader, this isn't a side conversation. It's core to how you think about strategy. Because while a rising tide can lift all boats, it only lifts the ones positioned to catch the wave.
What Do We Mean by "Whitespace"?
Whitespace refers to the untapped opportunities created by the ripple effects of a GPT. It's what emerges because of the technology, not the tech itself. Think of it as second-order terrain: new user behaviors, unmet needs, adjacent markets, and repositioning opportunities that weren't viable before the GPT shifted the rules.
What Is a General-Purpose Technology (GPT)?
GPTs are foundational innovations that don't just change an industry—they reshape entire economies. They share three key traits: they're widely applicable across sectors, they continually improve over time, and they spawn entire ecosystems of complementary innovation.
Electricity, the internet, mobile smartphones: these weren't just tools; they were platforms that rewired the way value is created and captured. And they didn't deliver their economic punch overnight. Most GPTs follow a J-curve, characterized by a dip or delay in productivity before complementary systems, skills, and infrastructure can catch up.
Why Whitespace Matters (And What Happens If You Ignore It)
The upside of identifying whitespace? Outsized returns, new markets, and the chance to lead rather than play catch-up. The downside? Becoming the next Kodak or Blockbuster—fixated on a technology's direct application while the market moves around you.
This isn't theoretical. Studies show that in previous GPT waves, as much as 75 percent of the economic value went to companies outside the tech sector—firms that adapted to and served new needs, rather than those that built the tech itself.
But whitespace isn't just opportunity. It's risk. Miss it, and you may find your core offering commoditized, your customer expectations leapfrogged, or your competitive advantage drained by someone who saw the shift coming.
Real-World Lessons: Internet, Mobile, and Cloud as Whitespace Machines
The Internet → New Ecosystems, Not Just Websites
The internet's rise in the 1990s didn't just create a new communication channel. It restructured coordination costs, unlocked global reach, and created entirely new categories of business.
FedEx and UPS didn't build the internet, but they scaled aggressively to meet the physical logistics demand of e-commerce. By 2024, they were handling about 95 percent of U.S. e-commerce deliveries.
Visa and Mastercard embedded themselves invisibly into nearly every digital transaction, capturing massive value as the financial plumbing underneath the internet economy.
Google and Search Engine Optimization (SEO) agencies capitalized on the flood of information by organizing and optimizing digital visibility. They didn't own content, but they curated and navigated it.
The lesson: you didn't need to build the web. You needed to understand what it made possible, i.e., the whitespace.
Mobile → Services That Moved with the User
Smartphones took the internet and put it in everyone's pocket. But the real shift was behavioral. People became constantly connected, location-aware, and camera-equipped. That changed everything.
Uber and Lyft weren't about building a better taxi. They reimagined transportation as real-time, mobile-first coordination between riders and drivers. Something only possible once GPS and mobile payments were ubiquitous.
Instagram didn't invent social media or digital photography. It capitalized on the smartphone camera plus mobile connectivity to create a new visual-first identity layer.
Retailers and media companies that adapted to mobile-first experiences, from shopping apps to bite-sized content, extended their relevance. Those who didn't fell behind.
Cloud Computing → Flexibility, Speed, and New Business Models
The shift to cloud wasn't just an IT cost decision. It became a strategic enabler for speed, experimentation, and scalability.
Startups leveraged the cloud to go from idea to product without touching a data center. The barriers to entry dropped. So did the excuses for slow iteration.
Software as a Service (SaaS) transformed how software was bought, sold, and delivered. Subscription pricing, continuous deployment, and usage-based billing all became possible and expected.
DevOps, APIs, and platform business models flourished in cloud-native environments. Stripe didn't just make payments easier. It let developers drop a full payments system into an app in hours, changing the speed at which companies could go to market.
Cloud's real whitespace was in enabling how companies could operate, not just where they hosted their servers.
The Generative AI Whitespace Is Already Opening
Generative AI is tracking like a true GPT: fast adoption, broad applicability, and early signs of structural change. Companies are already using it to:
Reinvent professional services (AI-generated legal drafts, marketing campaigns, support content)
Build trust and authenticity layers (e.g., watermarking, content provenance)
Expand into synthetic data and infrastructure demand (power grids, data center REITs)
Rethink upskilling and training—not to fight AI, but to pair with it
Here's the key: many of these opportunities aren't about building generative AI. They're about solving newly possible problems with it. That's the whitespace.
What Should You Be Doing?
1. Stop asking "How do we use AI?" Start asking "What's different now?" Tech implementation is a trap. It feels productive but keeps you focused on the tool, not the opportunity. Ask instead: What's actually different about how customers work, buy, or compete now? What no longer works the old way? Those questions point to where the real value is.
2. Make spotting shifts a regular practice. This doesn't require a formal process. Pick someone on your team—or rotate it—to regularly ask: What's changed in how our customers operate? What new behaviors are showing up? What's creating friction? Then set time to discuss it as a leadership team. Even 30 minutes every two weeks makes a difference.
3. Find what you're already good at that's now more valuable. You have an existing advantage: deep relationships, domain expertise, a trusted brand, or an operational skill that your competitors lack. Ask: what becomes more defensible or more valuable now that the market has shifted? Where can you uniquely create value even if you're not building the core technology?
4. Test before you bet big. Don't commit based on intuition. Validate first. Run quick prototypes, test fake doors, or run focused pilots. Build a portfolio of small bets instead of one massive swing. Most ideas will fail. The one that works can reshape your business.
5. Think in multiple time horizons. Most product orgs are starved for time and resources to work on what matters next year or in three years. Don't be that organization. Allocate some portion of your team's capacity to experiments and plays that won't move this quarter's revenue but might matter in 18 months.
6. Stay willing to pivot. Whitespace opportunities don't come with roadmaps. Be prepared to shift as you learn. Some of the best ideas (Slack, PayPal) started as experiments in a completely different direction and evolved into something bigger. Stay curious. Let the data redirect you.
Look Beyond the Obvious
General-purpose technologies are like tectonic shifts. They don't just create new tools. They move the ground beneath you. If you only focus on integrating the technology, you're playing on the surface. The real opportunity lies in seeing what's changing around it (the whitespace) and positioning yourself to meet new demand, solve new problems, or reshape the playing field entirely.
The tide is rising. The question is: have you moved your boat?
