The first industrial revolution (1760–1840) is the closest historical analogue to the AI shift hitting UK marketing in 2026.
The Luddites were not anti-technology. They were anti-the-distribution-of-the-gains. The 2026 marketing equivalent is the same question: who captures the AI productivity surplus.
The productivity paradox: firms that ran new machinery inside the old organisational structure saw modest gains. Firms that redesigned around the machinery saw order-of-magnitude gains.
Capital captured the gains by default. The operators who learned the new machine were paid more. The firms that bought early and redesigned hard defined the next century of category leadership.