AI is sucking in all the oxygen in the room, and investors who once rode on the software bandwagon are now abandoning it for faster horses that have AI pixie dust sprinkled on them. Not only is it taking attention and capital away from traditional software players, but AI is also making many of them obsolete. The global software market topped US$736 billion last year.
In 2011, prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen laid out his case for software-as-a-service (SaaS) with an essay titled “Why software is eating the world” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. His thesis: Software companies were poised to dominate the economy due to the transformative power of software across various industries. Software is the disruptor that helped digitise everything from physical objects to analogue information.
It enhances organisation, collaboration, data management and security while allowing for continuous innovation and new ways of doing things that would otherwise be impossible.
Over the past decade, businesses have digitised workflows using cloud computing, digital signatures and data analytics to improve efficiency and customer service. Now the great disruptor is getting disrupted. The new mantra in the tech world is that artificial intelligence, or AI, is eating software and the world.
