Attend any business conference or open any management book and an encounter with some variation of the same message is almost guaranteed: the pace of change in business is accelerating, and no one is safe from disruption. Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence (AI) have left many corporate giants nervously anticipating the death blow, and fearing the same fate as Kodak and Blockbuster, two giants felled by the digital revolution.

“The Innovator’s Dilemma”, a seminal book from 1997 by Clayton Christensen, a management guru, observed that incumbents hesitate to pursue radical innovations that would make their products or services cheaper or more convenient, for fear of denting the profitability of their existing businesses. In the midst of technological upheaval, that creates an opening for upstarts unencumbered by such considerations. Yet America Inc has experienced surprisingly little competitive disruption during the internet age. Incumbents appear to have become more secure, not less. And there is good reason to believe they will remain on their perches.

Consider the Fortune 500, America’s largest firms by revenue, ranging from Walmart to Wells Fargo and accounting for roughly a fifth of employment, half of sales and two-thirds of profits. We found that only 52 of the 500 were born after 1990, our yardstick for the internet era. Only seven of the 500 were created in 2007, while 280 predate America’s entry into the second world war. In fact, the rate at which new corporate giants arise has been slowing.

One explanation for this is that the digital revolution has not been all that revolutionary in some parts of the economy, notes Julian Birkinshaw of the London Business School. Communications, entertainment and shopping have been turned on their heads. But extracting oil from the ground and sending electricity down wires look much the same. High-profile flops like WeWork, a much-hyped office-sharing firm now at risk of collapse, and Katerra, which tried and failed to redefine the construction business by using prefabricated building components and fewer middlemen, have discouraged others from trying to disrupt their respective industries.

Another reason is that inertia has slowed the pace of competitive upheaval in many industries, buying time for incumbents to adapt to digital technologies. Although 65％ of Americans now bank online, nearly all the banks they use are ancient—the average age of those in the Fortune 500, including JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America, is 138. Fewer than 10％ of Americans switched banks last year, according to Kearney, a consultancy. That stickiness has made it difficult for would-be disrupters to build scale before incumbents imitate their innovations. A complicated regulatory system that favours big institutions with well-staffed compliance departments helps.

It is implied in the last paragraph that________.