[huijzer]

For what it’s worth, I’ve been trying to verify the claim from Microsoft and OpenAI that we would get more software in the future when the price of software would decrease. In other words, they claim that there is a supply problem for software and not a demand problem.

So far, I find it a pretty extreme statement, but it appears true here in the Netherlands. Most employees that I talk to at various industries can immediately point out one or two things which they would like to see automated. In most cases, software would replace data transfers which now occur via spreadsheets or paper.

[creshal]

There's already a whole industry of no-/low-code platforms that try to solve that very problem, Airtable etc. And a lot of companies have been very successful adopting them… or the last half dozen waves of digitalization.

But in my experience, there's some hard to solve bottlenecks for those sorts of organizations that still insist on largely paper-based workflows:

1. Their workflows are such a byzantine mess that either nobody understands them sufficiently to explain them (be it to a programmer, or to a no-code platform, or to an AI), or they're fundamentally broken and only fudged along by people who shouldn't be allowed to do their job, if the process was implemented "correctly"… or both.

2. It takes a special breed of people who have the necessary analytical skills to really pull off architecting automated workflows that work in practice. It comes natural to some managers and consultants, a lot of programmers, and a bunch of others, but it's not a widespread skill, and those individuals know their worth. People who already can't conceptualize the underlying problems won't be able to do so with the help of AI any time soon.

3. It still takes budget to implement such workflows, AI or not, and the affected orgs usually don't want to spend any money on improving themselves.