The Golden Age of Software

We’re at the cusp of the Golden Age of Software.

For the last 25 years the world has experienced online products that are buggy, barely come close to solving real customer problems, crash all the time, and cost companies billions to build and maintain.

But AI is about to make all of that go away — at least for the businesses that know how to leverage it in the right way.

AI will change nearly everything when it comes to building products. Especially for those of us who have toiled in the mines of product development and technology to perfect our craft for years and even decades now.

Imagine, perfect software!

Software that solves the customers problems the first time, has 0 bugs, stays up & running forever, has the right data and is cheap to build.

Fast, cheap or good — didn’t we always say you can only pick 2? But with AI we can have all 3.

That’s the crazy part about this revolution.

AI & the Assembly Line

I’m a car guy, so I’ll draw an analogy here.

When Henry Ford invented the assembly line in the early 1900s to run manufacturing more efficiently, he couldn’t have predicted what new ideas it would enable one day: from heated seats, to cruise control, to entertainment screens, the accelerative effects of the assembly line truly created a revolution in the automobile industry.

This is because in business there’s a strong correlation between the ability to go fast and the quality of innovation. Meaning, when good companies figure out ways to go exponentially faster, they typically don’t just build the same thing at a faster speed. Instead, they create brand new innovations that nobody had thought of before.

Henry Ford’s assembly line made building automobiles 10x faster, so he and his fellow manufacturers were able to radically innovate (e.g. heated seats). In the end, these innovations collected together made cars the standard mode of transportation in almost every country on earth.

And so it will be with AI & software development.

We can scarcely dream of what is to come except to say that AI will dramatically increase what is possible with software.

Of course, a “new world order” will first have to be established in software engineering organizations. Thousands of great companies will try to figure out how to use AI in the best ways possible and in the process invent new career paths, roles, processes, systems and methodologies.

It took about 60 years for the world to go from Fords assembly line all the way to heated seats. To do the equivalent in software engineering at the pace AI is evolving & with its inherent capabilities, it will take us no more than 5 years to see spectacular new kinds of software. (Just look at what’s already happening with Apple’s Vision Pro.)

That’s more than 10 times faster!

Our Unquenchable Thirst for Products

In the meantime, humanities unquenchable thirst for new product innovation will continue and the best technologists will be hard at work trying to find ways to meet those needs (in financially sustainable ways) much like they do today.

The biggest difference will be that we will build far more innovative products than ever before & the impact of these new tecnhnologies will be felt at a much, much bigger scale than simply heated seats.

AI will help us:

• Solve cancer
• Reverse climate change (or at least parts of it)
• Prevent hunger
• Fix broken infrastructure
• Make even more beautiful art (looking at you, Sora)

…as well as so much more that we are totally unequipped to predict right now.

Challenges

But are companies going to be able to harness AI and enter this Golden Age of Software?

Cost. Well, first there’s the challenge of the cost side. Have you heard the term “Cloud Barrons”? Well, you probably haven’t because I just invented it. It’s how I describe the big cloud companies and their favorite business strategy: lock customers in and then steadily raise prices.

Like Cloud, AI is going to be very, very expensive too.

The big players know it and are salivating at the thought. So don’t expect any “democratization” of AI prices anytime soon. The software industry promised lower prices with the migration to the Cloud as well and that lasted for maybe 5 years tops.

Companies like Nvidia & Microsoft are going to make out like bandits with AI at the expense of enterprise companies.

Talent. AI expertise is also a major hurdle. There is a complex array of technical skillsets under the umbrella term of AI. But then again engineers didn’t know much about how to build for Social, Cloud, Crypto and many other technologies when they first came out either. And the good news is that AI isn’t even too difficult to learn right now because learning platforms have become so good. But developers better get cracking!

Ultimately, the better a business’s engineers are at AI, the faster it enters into the Golden Age of Software.

Use cases. The other challenge with AI is figuring out the right use cases that will really make a difference to the bottom line. This can be difficult for a lot of businesses. With the Cloud for example, the path was clear and no special use cases were really needed for most companies. It was just about moving your software out of the data center and over to AWS or Azure.

Generating business value from AI is much more complicated.

In fact, finding the right business-problems-to-solve with AI right now is much harder than it looks. (Especially for companies that don’t typically keep such a list around!)

Conclusions

With AI, building perfect software is within our grasp.

But not for every business.

“Innovate or die,” will be more true than ever for companies in the Age of AI.

Any business that doesn’t start leveraging AI immediately is a sitting duck in the next several years for whichever competitor is already investing in AI expertise & know-how. AI is that powerful in terms of enabling both speed and scale of product innovation.

If CEOs and CTOs think that they can take their time to adopt AI (like they did with Cloud) they will be taking on enormous risk. Companies were able to migrate to Cloud slowly because customers don’t care where your servers are located. But customers definitely do care about the cost, quality and usefulness of the software they’re buying from you.

So, gone will be the time that companies could milk their legacy “sustain” products indefinitely. Not anymore! Like Ripley famously said, those products will get “nuked from orbit” by a competitor that offers a perfect version of the same product at a fraction of the cost (and solves all the challenges to migrate, to boot).

So, forget digital transformation. We’ve now leap-frogged into AI transformation.

And if as CEO, CTO or the head of Product you can you drive AI transformation forward, then your business can enjoy the benefits of the Golden Age of Software.

Btw, really interesting article for CTOs and how to get out of no-win situations here.