Artificial intelligence (AI) is quickly becoming a phenomenon in daily life — whether it’s staying organized with virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa, relying on Waze and Google Maps for the fastest commute time to work or tagging photos with Facebook’s facial recognition technology.

However, AI is driving equally powerful innovation in other ways that may not seem as familiar to average consumers and yet are dramatically improving the experience they have with their mobile devices.

That’s because one of the earliest and most ardent adopters of AI is the enterprise information technology (IT) operations that manage the networks you and I need to access. For them, AI is rapidly becoming a critical component to provide better visibility into the network environment, reduce costs, simplify operations and fix problems faster.

Gartner predicts that by 2020, AI will be one of the five most important investment priorities for more than 30% of chief information officers (CIOs). IT stands to gain a large share of that investment since, according to a report (registration required) by Tata Consulting Services, IT is the business function that uses AI the most, with 68% of companies using AI for IT functions.

As with any major technology game changer, AI’s application in transforming IT will create winners and losers among vendors. In fact, it should become one of the tech space’s more fascinating disruptions in the coming years.

Contrary to what one might expect, legacy IT vendors are actually at a disadvantage when it comes to capitalizing on AI. First, they must re-swizzle years-old architectures before they can integrate new AI technologies — with no time to spare in today’s hyper-fast market that crushes laggards.

Gone are the days when customers were willing to wait for an established vendor to get its act together in a popular new segment. As Thomas Friedman put it in “Thank You For Being Late,” “Average is officially over.”

In addition, the massive shift to AI requires not just a technology rethink inside established vendors but cultural adjustments as well. It’s a typical pattern that has repeated itself over and over through the years whenever change happens: An established company clings to its older “bread and butter” strategies that the market is moving on from, nevertheless maintains the outdated technical foundations on which those products were built and continues to reward employees based on the old ways, rather than incentivizing them to break the mold. This kind of resistance to change simply won’t work in the new AI world.