The biggest impact of LLMs is not replacing software.
The biggest impact of LLMs is not replacing software. It is turning "unwritten work" into something a business can actually run.
Most operators evaluate LLMs like a faster feature backlog. "Can it replace our ticketing tool, our CRM workflows, our knowledge base?"
That framing pushes you toward clean, formal processes. The problem is your most expensive work is rarely clean.
In a mid-sized services or distribution business, the real bottleneck lives in Slack threads, inboxes, call notes, and "ask Maria." It is exception handling, judgment calls, customer nuance, vendor negotiation, and the half-finished thinking no system ever captured.
Vertical SaaS already formalized the easy 60 percent. Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk are good at repeatable states and fields.
LLMs matter when the work has no stable schema yet. They sit in the messy middle and make it legible enough to route, summarize, draft, audit, and hand off without forcing a redesign of how people actually operate.
The surprise is where the failure shows up. Teams buy an "AI layer" and then discover their real constraint is not prompts, it is ownership: who is accountable for decisions the model is now helping to produce.
Once unwritten work becomes executable, it also becomes governable. And that is where most companies realize they were never just buying automation.