[TeMPOraL]

The problem is that "enterprise-grade intelligence", by its very nature, doesn't want to be trapped in a pipe feeding apps - it subsumes apps, reducing them to mere background tool calls.

The perfect "killer app" for AI would kill most software products and SaaS as we know them. The code doing the useful part would still be there, but stripped off branding, customer funnels and other traps, upsell channels, etc. As a user, I'd be more than happy to see it (at least as long as the AI frontend part was well-developed for power users); obviously, product owners hate this.

[abrbhat]

(Good) Apps take the context of the user and their use-case from their head and make it into something the user can see and interact with. An app might or might not be the 'product'. Unfortunately it seems there is always going to be some 'product' so dark patterns might be here to stay.

[TeMPOraL]

Right. Problem is, the user interface is also the perfect marketing channel, because it stands between the user and some outcome they want.

Due to technical and social limitations, most apps are also limited in what they can do, this naturally shapes and bounds them and their UIs, forming user-facing software products.

Intelligence of the kind supplied by SOTA LLMs, is able to both subsume the UI, by taking much broader context of the user and the use case into account, distilling it down to minimal interaction patterns for a specific user and situation, and also blur the boundaries of products, by connecting and chaining them on the fly. This kills the marketing channel (UI) and trims the organizational structure itself (product), by turning a large SaaS into a bunch of API endpoints for AI runtime to call.

Of course, this is the ideal. I doubt it'll materialize, or if it does, that it'll survive for long, because there's half a software industry's worth of middlemen under risk of being cut out, and thus with a reason to fight it.