There's currently a billboard up in San Francisco that basically says "use AI to reduce your saas costs".
And I'm thinking - has anyone actually done that for something meaningful?
Replacing salesforce as your crm or replacing Shopify as your e-commerce platform?
I get the hype but AI doesn't remove accountability, it just moves it up. Oh you can do with 1 person what 3 people used to do? Great, that 1 person is now accountable for 3 person's jobs. And people are naturally uncomfortable with that - you need to understand what's going on and be able to investigate / fix. It's different than say, weaving machines replacing jobs because weaving machines were consistent. 1 person could confidently produce what x weavers could before. But AI is not, and that variability in output & quality introduces massive friction.
So as of now, in both software and people, there's a real limit to how much AI can replace because the remaining people still are equally accountable.
tick tock tick tock...
Vendor lock-in is real and it’s scary. You are helpless to the constant price increases and each passing renewal you get deeper and deeper into the lock-in. Here’s to the day when someone clever with AI can disintermediate this situation. You don’t have to vibecode your own CRM but imagine a deterministic harness that lets you lego-block CRM functions like lead management, opportunity tracking, contact list, campaigns. There shouldn’t be a moat anymore.