AI makes tool-building easier, but the hard part isn't writing code

AI, Tools and Transformation

Benedict Evans argues that while AI lets non-engineers build tools in five minutes, the real bottleneck in enterprise software was never coding. Most professionals don't spot automatable tasks in their own work, and the most valuable workflows are tangled across departments, systems, and regulations. Even when a problem is identified, getting a whole company to adopt a new tool still takes an 18-month sales cycle. He frames enterprise software as a spectrum from institutionalized (SAP) to improvised (Excel, email). When an improvised workaround becomes critical and repetitive, a company eventually institutionalizes it as a SaaS product—Carta is a $4B company that manages one spreadsheet for the CFO.

Why it matters: This isn't a product release, but it delivers the framework most missing from current AI adoption discourse: after tool-building costs collapse, the bottleneck shifts to demand discovery and organizational inertia. Concrete examples (divorce lawyers, SAP-adjacent scripts), not...