AI will commoditize the part of software your CFO obsesses over.
AI will commoditize the part of software your CFO obsesses over.
So why are teams still choosing vendors based on features and day rates?
In most SMB and mid-market transformations, the safe move is to "buy a platform" and then negotiate hard on build cost. The logic is clean: if Salesforce, Microsoft, or SAP already have the modules, execution is just filling gaps.
AI makes that instinct more expensive.
The screens, workflows, reports, even chunks of code get cheaper to produce. What does not get cheaper is deciding what should exist in the first place, and what must never exist at all.
When the cost of building drops, the penalty for building the wrong thing rises. You ship more, faster, and you lock in more assumptions about pricing, approvals, data ownership, and who can override what.
Six months later the surprise is never "the AI did not work." It is that nobody can explain why a customer cannot be refunded, why ops cannot see margin, or why the data in Shopify does not match the data in finance.
The budget line that shrinks is the least important one.
The one that grows is the cost of unwinding decisions that felt "obvious" at the time. And that bill usually shows up right when the business needs options.