SOFTWARE ATE THE WORLD. ALMOST. NOW AI IS EATING SOFTWARE.
AI will disrupt software development by decreasing dev costs and increasing dev output. This will radically disrupt software businesses as well as companies supporting the development and sale of software talent. Furthermore, changes to the nature and speed of software product development will affect the way marketers support product research, positioning, marcomms, pricing and so on. I’d love to know how you think it will affect you.
A good friend’s son recently completed his Masters degree in Cyber Security. If you’d asked me a year ago about his chances of gainful employment on reaching this milestone I would have bet my house, my car and my private plane that he would be knocking back job offers left, right and centre. Show him the money, money, money.
The reality couldn’t be more starkly different. He can’t get even the faintest sniff at a role for love or money. The word on the street is that there’s a whole layer of entry-level software development roles that can be filled by AI at a lower cost and with less training, etc, etc. Remember STEM? Ha ha ha. If only little Johnny had left school at grade 10 and become a plumber. He’d be more likely to own that private plane that I can only dream about.
The future of programming
Hold the phone. What does the future of programming have to do with B2B marketing? Actually quite a lot, in my mind. You know, a butterfly flapping its wings and causing cyclones kinda theory. But stick with me and disagree if you must when we get there.
Emad Mostaque, the CEO of Stability AI, who comes across as smart enough to literally have an LLM in his head, said in this interview that there will be no programmers in the next five years. While Emad is thought to be prone to exaggeration by some, this excellent piece by SK Ventures isn’t far off in predicting a world where the cost of software drops to approximately zero.
It’s worth reading just for the reminder it provides of the range of factors to be considered in making such a hot take: why software hasn’t eaten the world; software supply and demand and technical debt; technology’s declining cost curves for CPUs, storage and bandwidth; the effect of cost-disease on selected goods and services; the impact of LLM’s on jobs in terms of how Predictable they are (does the same cause lead to the same effect) versus how Grammatical (rules-based) they are; and so on.
Make it stand out
The authors, Paul Kedrosky & Eric Norlin, also illustrate, through a practical example, why “it’s possible to write almost every sort of code with such technologies, from microservices joining together various web services (a task for which you might previously have paid a developer $10,000 on Upwork) to an entire mobile app (a task that might cost you $20,000 to $50,000 or more).”
They conclude that “for the first time in decades, the technology industry could return to its roots, and, by unleashing a wave of software production, truly create more value than its captures.”
The software giveth, and the software taketh
Wow. Some nice words there. Roots. Unleashing. Wave. Value. Nice VC-type talk.
But is there an implied reckoning of sorts for tech talent and related industries?
Entire businesses supporting the development and employment of tech talent could disappear or be severely impacted, from universities to online courses to publishers to online talent matching platforms to recruiters
Countries like the Philippines and India with huge pools of offshore talent supporting software development, customer services and other grammatical + predictable types of work will need to consider and deliver major reskilling and retooling of their workforce to keep large swathes of the population from becoming unemployed
While this is a great feel-good list of benefits of AI for Saas products, I think existing software companies will face unprecedented disruption in terms of market dynamics such as competition (new, more capable and agile AI-powered companies coming out of nowhere with better pricing or features, or an offering serving certain customer segments far more effectively and so on), and major shifts to customer landscapes (entire segments going out of business or requiring far fewer seats or not requiring professional services support)
Additionally, companies will have to cope with the changes to how they manage rapidly evolving product roadmaps and much faster product and dev lifecycles, ever-changing dev resourcing pools, be that AI and/or some form of human oversight, IP, which LLM’ they align with, quality control, security, product/feature launch velocity as well as related impacts to marketing, sales, and other functions.
And what exactly does all of this have to do with marketing?
While there have been countless articles written about the positive transformational impact of AI on marketing (personalisation, analytics, predictability, etc.), how will these significant changes to how software is developed impact marketers? As a light touch (rather than a deep dive) some areas would include:
Managing how your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) is changing especially where your customers have a skew toward being techie themselves
Effectively managing your product positioning and communicating/differentiating your USP and value prop in an ever-changing competitive space
Aligning your product marketing to much faster launch velocity and changing dev lifecycles
Communicating value and managing pricing in a “zero-cost” world
Building effective marketing research practices to suit faster dev cyclesCommunicating “black box” value where a significant part of the benefits your product can deliver is because of hard-to-explain AI
Having the skills to manage martech with fewer if any tech resources
What are the other ways in which marketing will be impacted by low-cost, high-speed software development? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this specific factor.
How will it affect the market context in which you work (suppliers, customers, partners, etc.) as well as how you work better with other departments and functions and how will it impact the practice of marketing in general? DM’s are open ;-)
But wait. Back to software development. Will it cease to exist as a career?
Despite the gloomy take above, this article makes a case for why humans will continue to surpass AI when it comes to some of those good old soft skills, like creativity and innovation and collaboration and communication and so on.
It's worth a read for more info on the crucial skills software developers will need as well as a more detailed overview on how AI has impacted software development and some of the popular tools that have been disintermediating developers.
It also references a new software dev process for the age of AI by the Director of AI at Tesla, Andrej Karpathy, called Software 2.0. On a more positive note, this article ends with the following call to arms.
“Artificial intelligence will radically reshape software development and force software developers to acquire new skills in order to stay relevant. Those who will adapt most successfully to the coming era will get to enjoy an abundance of work opportunities, but the process will require a different mindset than many software developers have today.”
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