AI tools are certainly changing the game for software development. JPMorgan Chase Chief Financial Officer Jeremy Barnum told analysts at a meeting in May that he had been indulging in vibe coding, describing it as “pretty amazing.”
But highly complex software applications running mission-critical tasks won’t be simple to replace. Especially those running on data related to sensitive—and often regulated—areas such as human resources and finance.
“More than 65% of the Fortune 500 use us, and not one of them is going to say ‘Come in here AI startup and run my back office and financial controls,’” Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach said in an interview.
Companies such as Workday and Salesforce, which disrupted the more traditional on-premise software industry not too long ago, are working furiously to adopt AI themselves within their own products. Agents—AI chatbots that are enabled to take certain actions on behalf of people—are a big part of this effort.
Nearly every software-as-a-service company is now selling agent tools to their customers, though RBC analysts argued in a report this week that the real opportunity will come from “multi-agentic” systems that can operate across different software applications, which no one has really cracked yet.
“For example, a sales leader should be able to use natural language to onboard a new salesperson,” RBC’s report read, executing across HR identity systems, expense cards, training programs and so on.
Vibe coding is unlikely to pull that off. In his own report earlier this month, longtime software analyst Brent Thill of Jefferies cited the “meaningful complexity” across current business software workflows that AI cannot yet replace. “In our view, the intricacies of enterprise architecture make full AI disintermediation of software unlikely,” he wrote.
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