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.
And that's just atlassian.
Start adding stuff that costs many many many yearly salaries (special software for managing inventories and warehouses) it starts making sense to prototype alternatives internally.
I came to the conclusion that if it's not Teams/SharePoint or the moat is on the extreme legal complexity side (e.g. payrolls), you can at least think of building an alternative that is good enough without needing to be perfect.
Yes, you wouldn't get something near as complicatedas JIRA, but that would be a good thing! Look, it's enterprise software, so I'm sure there's somewhere that needs to have the overcomplicated permissions system otherwise contractors are going to steal everything that isn't bolted down, but most places I've been don't need, and thus don't use most of all of that crap. If the ticket can only go from planned to done by a certain group of users, backed by LDAP... let's just say, I'm not going to miss configuring which group gets which permissions system.
JIRA's the perfect example of disruption, too. Everyone's got their bespoke workflow, and JIRA has to be customizable to suit all of them. Bespoke software just doesn't have to the same way.