18 businesses ranked by AI disruption risk, from Chegg to Shopify |
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18 businesses ranked by AI disruption risk, from Chegg to Shopify
One newsletter's ranking of AI disruption risk across 18 businesses, from Chegg to Shopify, shows which business models look most and least exposed
Artificial intelligence does not threaten every company equally, according to a ranking in Drew Cohen Capital's newsletter, Five Minute Money. The newsletter finds that the danger is concentrated in a handful of business models instead of being spread evenly across the market. Companies selling a task that a chatbot can roughly replicate for free sit near the bottom. Companies whose software runs underneath operations their customers cannot easily remove sit near the top.
The newsletter grades 18 businesses on a letter scale that runs from S, the lowest risk, down to F, the highest. Each grade measures only the AI disruption risk built into how a company makes money. An S marks minimal AI risk. An A means the threat still looks far-fetched, though possible. A B signals a more real risk that is still not too severe. A C means the risk has become more formidable. An F marks a business the newsletter considers already taken apart by AI.
The ranking is not a set of stock recommendations. The newsletter treats valuation as a separate question from risk. A company with heavy exposure may already trade at a price that reflects it. A low-risk grade, in turn, says nothing about whether a stock is cheap.
The same split shows up at both ends of the list. Lower-ranked names, including Chegg, parts of Atlassian $TEAM, CoStar and Intuit $INTU's Credit Karma, sell products built around work that AI can approximate at no cost to the user. Top-ranked names such as Palantir $PLTR, CrowdStrike $CRWD, Shopify $SHOP, ServiceNow $NOW and Constellation Software provide infrastructure their customers are unlikely to rip out. A middle band of advertising and marketplace companies includes Amazon $AMZN, Sea Limited, Mercado Libre, Booking and Airbnb $ABNB. Their grades hinge on whether habitual buying holds up against AI agents that can search and book on a consumer's behalf.
The slides below follow the newsletter's order, from the most exposed business to the least exposed. Booking and Airbnb share one slide, matching the newsletter's choice to cover them in a single section. Counting that pair as one entry brings the newsletter's 19 named companies to its stated total of 18. Every tier placement and judgment that follows belongs to the newsletter, not to Quartz. Read together, the grades offer one framework for judging which businesses AI is most likely to disrupt and which look harder to displace.
Chegg: a free chatbot does the homework help students paid for
Chegg sits alone in the F tier of Drew Cohen Capital's newsletter, the lowest grade on its S-to-F scale of AI disruption risk. The newsletter's view is that a free chatbot now does the job college students used to pay Chegg for, and that AI has already taken the business apart.
Chegg is an online education company based in Santa Clara, California. It rents textbooks and offers tutoring alongside homework help. Its shares trade on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker CHGG.
Homework help is the part of the business the newsletter focuses on. College students have used Chegg largely for their assignments, typically through a monthly subscription to its Chegg Study service. The model rested on a simple trade. Students paid for answers and step-by-step explanations they could not easily find elsewhere.
Free chatbots such as OpenAI's ChatGPT undercut that trade. A student can paste a problem into one and get a worked answer in seconds. The newsletter argues those answers do not need to be fully correct to hurt Chegg. They only need to be good enough for a student weighing whether a subscription is still worth paying for.
The figures the newsletter cites show the damage. Chegg's revenue was down 47% over the last 12 months. Its operating margin was negative 20%. That means the costs of running the business exceeded the revenue it brought in.
Chegg's stock was already weak before ChatGPT arrived, according to the newsletter. It then fell sharply. The company's market capitalization has fallen to $84 million.
Chegg is the only company in the newsletter's ranking to receive an F. Four companies sit in the next tier up, C: Atlassian $TEAM, Intuit $INTU, Adobe $ADBE and CoStar. The newsletter sees their AI risk as having become more formidable. For Chegg, it treats the disruption as something that has already happened rather than a threat still taking shape.
The F grade reflects a product students once paid for that now has a free substitute.
Atlassian: AI can approximate parts of its collaboration software
Atlassian $TEAM sits in the C tier of Drew Cohen Capital's AI risk ranking. The newsletter groups parts of Atlassian's business with products built around tasks that AI can now approximate for free.
C is the band where the newsletter judges AI risk to have become more formidable. It is the second-worst tier on the scale. Only Chegg, the lone F-tier company, ranks lower. Atlassian shares the C tier with Intuit $INTU, Adobe $ADBE and CoStar, and the newsletter lists it first among those four.
The newsletter's wording limits that exposure to parts of the business rather than the company as a whole. It does not describe every Atlassian product as something a chatbot can replace.
Mike Cannon-Brookes and Scott Farquhar founded Atlassian in Sydney in 2002. The company went public on Nasdaq $NDAQ in December 2015 under the ticker TEAM. It sells software that teams use to plan, track and document their work.
Jira is its best-known product. Software developers and other teams use it to log tasks, track bugs and manage projects. Confluence is a shared workspace where teams write and store documentation, meeting notes and internal knowledge.
The company also owns Trello, a visual board for organizing tasks, which it acquired in 2017. Bitbucket hosts code repositories for developers. Atlassian bought Loom, a tool for recording short screen-share videos, in 2023.
Jira Service Management handles IT support requests and service desks inside organizations. That puts it in the IT service management category, where it competes with ServiceNow $NOW. The newsletter places ServiceNow in its A tier.
In 2024, Atlassian launched Rovo, an AI product that searches across a company's Atlassian tools and connected apps. Rovo also lets teams build and use AI agents for routine work.
Atlassian ended support for its server products in February 2024. That change pushed customers toward its cloud subscriptions or its self-managed Data Center editions.
The C-tier grade covers business-model risk only. It is not a verdict on whether Atlassian shares are cheap or expensive.
Intuit: AI chatbots expose Credit Karma
Intuit $INTU sits in the C tier of Drew Cohen Capital's newsletter ranking, the band where AI risk has become more formidable. The newsletter points to Credit Karma, Intuit's consumer finance service, as a product built around tasks that AI can approximate for free.
Intuit is a financial software company based in Mountain View, California. Scott Cook and Tom Proulx founded it in 1983. Its products serve consumers and small businesses at the points where money and paperwork meet.
TurboTax helps Americans prepare and file their income tax returns. QuickBooks handles bookkeeping, invoicing and payroll for small businesses. Mailchimp, which Intuit acquired in 2021, sends marketing emails for companies. Credit Karma completes the lineup as the company's consumer-facing personal finance app.
Kenneth Lin co-founded Credit Karma in 2007. The service is based in Oakland, California. Intuit agreed to buy it in 2020 in a deal valued at about $7.1 billion. The service gives users access to their credit scores and reports from TransUnion and Equifax.
Members pay nothing for that access. Credit Karma instead earns money when members sign up for credit cards, loans and other financial products it recommends. The companies offering those products pay for the referrals.
The newsletter's exposure point is specific to one unit. It names Credit Karma, not Intuit as a whole, when it groups the company with businesses whose products AI can approximate for free. TurboTax, QuickBooks and Mailchimp do not appear in that group.
Intuit introduced its own generative AI assistant, Intuit Assist, in 2023. The company built it into products including TurboTax, QuickBooks, Credit Karma and Mailchimp.
The C tier placement reflects the newsletter's view that Intuit's risk is more serious than that of the companies in the A and B tiers. It stops short of the F tier, which the newsletter reserves for a business AI has already taken apart.
Adobe: creative software maker faces more formidable AI risk
Drew Cohen Capital's Five Minute Money newsletter places Adobe $ADBE in its C tier. On the newsletter's scale, that grade means the AI risk to a business model has become more formidable.
That puts Adobe among four C-tier companies, alongside Atlassian $TEAM, Intuit $INTU and CoStar. Only Chegg, the lone F-tier name, sits lower in the ranking. The newsletter's section on Adobe refers to the company's 3Q26 earnings call.
Adobe is the San Jose, California, company behind Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro and After Effects. John Warnock and Charles Geschke founded it in 1982. It also created the PDF format and sells Acrobat software for working with those files.
Most of its creative tools are sold through Creative Cloud, a subscription bundle. Adobe moved fully to subscriptions in 2013, when it stopped selling new versions of its boxed Creative Suite. Since then, the company has depended on customers renewing year after year rather than buying software once. A second business, Digital Experience, sells marketing and analytics software to companies.
Generative AI tools now work in territory those creative products cover. Image generators such as Midjourney and OpenAI's DALL-E produce pictures from........