A scan for industries running old, proprietary, mission-critical software that current technology can address gracefully by insertion: translate, wrap, automate, view at the seams, without replacing the incumbent core.
There is no untouched greenfield. Every viable space already has an incumbent. The opportunity is a residual wedge beside it, not an empty field.
Two independent verification passes tested all 88 distinct spaces: a kill-mandated adversarial skeptic, then a balanced judge asking whether a real residual wedge survives. Naive composite scores systematically over-rated occupied markets, so the rankings below are the calibrated, post-verification scores.
The durable wedges share one shape: assemble a verifiable provenance / compliance / audit packet from locked forward data, then file it into an emerging open rail (TRACES, EPCIS, AAS/DPP, ERA/FADGI, OSDU), wrapping the system of record read-only. Differentiated value is fidelity and the audit trail, not storage or workflow.
Six sequenced multi-agent workflows, roughly 280 agent runs and ~9M research tokens, on the NAICS 2022 classifier spine. Each market figure is approximate; moving regulatory facts were verified against primary sources and flagged where uncertain.
All 79 spaces that pass the capability-and-grace filter, ranked by calibrated fit. Click any row for the residual wedge and the incumbent already present. Sort by any column; filter by tier, verdict, or cut.
| Opportunity space | NAICS | $ | Legacy | DX | RGate | RTail | Grace | CapFit | Thr | Fit ▾ | Verdict |
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Forward tools (design, make, operate) own the data in formats only they read. The regulation-mandated inverse (operate, maintain, decommission, recover, reuse) sits downstream, under-tooled, on that same locked data. 22 end-of-life / recovery chains, each verified for current regulatory status.
| Chain | Regulation (status) | Forward data it sits on | Graceful insertion | Addr. |
|---|
The seven calibrated-shortlist survivors, each a full 11-section dossier: market and consolidation, the bottleneck artifact, the proprietary-format zoo, the interchange-standard situation, the developer surface, the graceful entry, regulatory gate vs tailwind, barriers, demand signals, and tiered entry options. Click to read.
NAICS 2022 chosen for depth (~1,012 6-digit industries, ~2.4× ISIC) and free access; ISIC Rev.4 as the crosswalk hub. 44 reference systems discovered in total.