Pattern: The Adequacy Threshold

Disruption doesn't require perfection. It requires adequacy at scale. When an alternative delivers 80% of the quality at 10% of the cost, the market doesn't deliberate. It switches. The remaining 20% of quality turns out to be a luxury nobody was willing to fund.

The Adequacy Threshold is the economic mechanism that converts expertise premiums into cost liabilities. It operates whenever quality tolerances are wider than experts believe them to be.

The pattern operates in three phases.

First, a cheaper alternative appears that experts dismiss as inadequate. The gap between "professional grade" and "good enough" seems obvious to practitioners. Clients appear to agree.

Second, the alternative improves to approximately 75-80% parity. At this point, a segment of the market — typically high-volume, lower-stakes decisions — begins substituting. The expert market contracts but doesn't collapse. Experts reassure themselves that the "important" work remains protected.

Third, the threshold crosses. The market discovers that the 20% quality gap matters in fewer situations than assumed. Clients who previously insisted on premium quality accept adequate quality when the cost differential becomes undeniable. The expert market doesn't shrink — it collapses to the niche.

Desktop publishing (1985-1995): Professional typesetters dismissed early DTP as crude. They were correct. The output was inferior. Within a decade, 90% of typesetting work was done by non-professionals using PageMaker and QuarkXPress. The remaining 10% — high-end book design, luxury brand work — sustained a fraction of the original workforce.

Digital photography (2000-2010): Professional photographers argued that digital couldn't match film quality. They were correct. The market didn't care. Wedding photography, product photography, and photojournalism shifted to digital not because it was better, but because it was adequate and dramatically cheaper per image.

Indian call centers (2000-2005): American call center workers were objectively better at English-language customer service. Indian replacements operated at approximately 75% quality. At 20% of the cost, the math was decisive. 250,000 American jobs were displaced in five years.

AI-assisted legal research is currently operating at the threshold boundary. Tools like Harvey and CoCounsel produce research memos at 75-85% of associate quality. At $50/month versus $300/hour, the economics are approaching the tipping point for routine matters.

AI-generated marketing copy has already crossed the threshold for social media, email campaigns, and standard web content. The premium copywriter market has contracted to brand voice, long-form, and high-stakes communications.

AI code generation is at approximately 70-80% parity for standard implementation tasks. The threshold crossing is expected within 12-18 months for CRUD applications, API integrations, and standard frontend development.

Your clients have started comparing your output to free or near-free alternatives.

Procurement has introduced a "cost per unit of quality" metric that didn't exist two years ago.

Junior staff using AI tools are producing deliverables that are "surprisingly close" to senior output.

Your expertise premium is being questioned not because your work is worse, but because the alternative has become adequate.

The phrase "good enough for this use case" is appearing in project discussions with increasing frequency.

RFPs now include questions about AI tool usage — not as innovation, but as cost containment.