AI made software dramatically cheaper to create
AI made software dramatically cheaper to create. It did not make bad software decisions cheaper. If anything, it made them more common.
When a build cost $400k, the price did some of the thinking. Owners hesitated. Proposals got questioned. Half-ideas died in the meeting where someone asked what it would earn back.
When the same build costs $60k and six weeks, the hesitation disappears, and with it the only filter many companies had.
What did not get cheaper: the integration with the accounting system, the data nobody cleaned, the training, the process change that was the actual point, the maintenance that starts the day after launch, and the cost of a wrong choice that the business now runs on.
Construction was maybe a third of a project's true cost. AI cut that third. The other two thirds are where projects fail, and they are untouched.
So the company that could afford one bad project a year can now afford four. It will find that out in year two, when four half-adopted tools are each owned by nobody and the team is asking for a fifth to fix the mess.
The check has not changed: what does this change in the business, who owns it, and what is the cost of being wrong. The price dropping is a reason to ask the question more often, not less.