Software just for me
An interesting thing that is happening with AI is that as the cost of software is going down, we can create very different kinds of software. In other words, we can create software that is unique for one particular person, just for me.
Here’s an example. If you want to manage a project today, you would probably start with some sort of project management software. Now, that project management software has been built to support many different kinds of use cases, many different kinds of customers, and it will have a gazillion and one features and decisions made about it that only apply or apply to a very wide group of people.
It’s probably very thoughtful to do that really well for a large group of people. But the reality is, is that if you need something that is just for you or your very specific use case, you could probably build something that is better than its generic solution.
This is where we are today. It’s probably better to build something from scratch that is just for you if only you are going to use it. And the reasons for it are actually manyfold. First of all, it will solve your problem better than any alternative.
But second, it will also be free. You will not need to pay somebody money. The only thing you have to pay is essentially the tokens of an AI provider, and those are not very expensive. And so you will have something perfectly made for you, and it will be free.
What about big software?
An argument that people running big software companies make is that this is not going to happen to them because their software is big and complicated and does a lot of things for really large organizations.
I’m actually not sure whether that’s true or not. There’s two arguments you could make.
The first one is that big software is really big and the cost of replicating it is going to be far greater, even just in terms of time and effort with AI, than it is to just buy it off the shelf. This might actually be true because the software is not just selling the software, it’s selling transformation and it’s selling solutions to problems.
Now, the counter argument is that any organization which is willing to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars on software can probably free up sufficient number of people to full-time work on big software just for them. And that might be sufficient.
Now, as a last counter to the above, you could argue that big software companies will transform themselves as well. And they’ll just get proportionally more ambitious and proportionally better at solving the problems that they set out to solve.
And so maybe even if you do dedicate a small number of people to build software custom for you and your organization, it’s not going to be worth it because that company that is selling software just does a better job regardless, no matter if everybody has amazing AIs available to them.
I don’t know what the future for software is going to be, but for sure it’s going to be interesting.