AI-generated code still requires software engineers to build, test, debug, deploy, secure, monitor, be on-call, support, handle incidents, and so on. That's very expensive. It is much cheaper to pay a small monthly fee to a SaaS company.
So what happens is a corporation ends up spending a lot of money for a square tool that they have to hammer into a circle hole. They do it because the alternative is worse.
AI coding does not allow you to build anything even mildly complex with no programmers yet. But it does reduced by an order of magnitude the amount of money you need to spend on programming a solution that would work better.
Another thing AI enables is significantly lower switching costs. A friend of mine owned an in person and online retailer that was early to the game, having come online in the late 90s. I remember asking him, sometime around 2010, when his Store had become very difficult to use, why he didn’t switch to a more modern selling platform, and the answer was that it would have taken him years to get his inventory moved from one system to another. Modern AI probably could’ve done almost all of the work for him.
I can’t even imagine what would happen if somebody like Ford wanted to get off of their SAP or Oracle solution. A lot of these products don’t withhold access to your data but they also won’t provide it to you in any format that could be used without a ton of work that until recently would’ve required a large number of man hours
Could you share any data on this? Are there any case studies you could reference or at least personal experience? One order of magnitude is 10x improvement in cost, right?
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