Software products were built for a world without AI
For decades, enterprises purchased software products because building custom solutions was prohibitively expensive. You bought the closest thing to what you needed, then bent your workflows to match the tool. Teams spent months on implementation, training, and change management—only to end up with software that solved 70% of the problem and created new ones along the way.
AI has collapsed the cost and complexity of software creation. What once required a team of engineers and six-figure budgets can now be architected, built, and deployed in weeks. The economics that justified generic products—amortising development costs across thousands of customers—no longer hold when building to your exact specification is faster and cheaper than adapting someone else's vision.
This isn't a prediction. It's already happening. Forward-thinking enterprises are abandoning bloated SaaS platforms in favour of purpose-built systems that mirror their actual operations—not an approximation of them.