Forget arithmetic change. Think geometric change. And then expect things to change even faster than that.

That was one of the themes and warnings of Bill Hortz, the founder and dean of the Institute for Innovation Development, which held a conference at a Nasdaq office in Manhattan on Thursday.

He said financial services providers should consider making alliances with financial tech companies that understand the dynamics of change and where technology is going over the next generation. Not being able to manage and understand it could destroy a business, panelists said.

Still, change is no big deal, Hortz said, and has been with us since humans lived in caves, but the pace of recent technological change is now happening at a faster rate than ever and in no place is it felt as much as in the financial services industry. The pace of change, he warned, is happening at a compounded rate, shattering many of the assumptions of veteran advisors.

The pace of technological change threatens to overwhelm many advisors, whose business school training can sometimes hamper their ability to adjust in a new era, he said.

“Before, change was happening, but it was generational. You could adjust to it. And a business model was, in essence, immortal,” Hortz said. In the 1950s, he said, the average company stayed in the S&P 500 for 75 years.

“Today it is 14 years and dropping rapidly,” he said. Change is feeding on itself and the affects of analytics and artificial intelligence will be expanding. They will dramatically change “client experiences and client interfaces,” Hortz said. 

It will also create much new business, he noted.

One billion sensors will be put on three to five billion products over the next few years, he said.

“They will be talking to each other, creating new products and that, in and of itself, is going to create 17 trillion dollars of new value that doesn’t exist right now,” Hortz said.

Traditional business thinking won’t be able to attract any of these trillions of dollars in new value. He pointed to companies that, using traditional models, thought they knew their clients. Examples of the latter, he added, include Kodak, Blockbuster and Borders bookstores.

“They built empires. They knew their customers. They were very successful until it changed,” Hortz noted.

Why did they fail?

They had “no mechanism” to ensure they were effectively coping with change. “They said, let’s just focus on what we did last year, get 10 percent more and let’s just focus on efficiency,” he said.

Many advisors could also be headed for trouble. With $30 trillion due to be transferred to millennials over the next two decades, some panelists at the conference noted, the problem is very few of them have advisors. And many advisors don’t have the ability to connect with this new generation technologically.

The danger to the advisory industry, added Jess Podell, the managing director of financial innovator accelerator Startupbootcamp Fintech, is that it has been very difficult to innovate.

“Historically, they have not been open to change,” according to Podell.

But Hortz warned that, in this age when innovation happens at faster and faster rates, “it is going to be impossible to continue business as usual.”