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
There is only one program that offers this ability, but you need to pay for the entire software suite, and the process is painfully convoluted anyway. We went from doing maybe 2-3 files a day to do doing 2-3 files an hour.
I have repeated ad-nausea that the magic of LLMs is the ability to built the exact tool you need for the exact job you are doing. No need for the expensive and complex 750k LOC full tool shed software suite.
I’m working with a company now that thinks that AI is great until you need to deploy to Prod. Probably true in some cases, especially for tools built with Prod environments as targets.
But I’m using Claude Code for a tool that doesn’t absolutely require that sort of environment. It helps a company map data (insurance risk exposure data) to a predefined intermediate layout and column schema.
I know that I’ll run into resistance once I say “this could be deployed to Prod” but I think AI is a major win for Prod-like things.
My professional world largely lives in spreadsheets and relational databases. Neither going anywhere anytime soon. And spreadsheets are the currency of the business and industry in so many ways. They are very prod-like in my opinion.