Will AI actually kill software companies and developers?

 I'm hearing a lot about AI "killing" software companies. I just wanted to share some experiences and thoughts.

I worked at The Coca-Cola Company 30+ years ago. There was this idea that Coke should build its own software internally because it gave us total control over every feature we could ever want and that this was a competitive advantage. I would argue that for one off applications, this is true, but that for commodity applications where there is a large marketplace for multiple products, building on your own makes little sense. It is hard to understand the few that building your own database ODBC driver or MAPI driver for application automation provides a competitive advantage. For many years, many applications have provided the necessary integration today into the the necessary industry standards that have widespread support. We had a set of internal apps called KO/Office. Its key feature was email and discussion (threaded discussion). There was a DOS version and a Windows version. It worked ok. It didn’t work well in situations where there were disconnected offices, or rarely connected. This happened with offices in Africa as well as Asia at the time. We think of a standard internet connection as the default today, but it wasn’t back 30 years ago. While we could handle the issue with email, the discussion boards were not easily resolved, if they ever were. We spent millions trying to get “distributed bulletin board” to work and I don’t remember it working. To keep email working, we had rows of dos based computers that all they did was to login to various servers, look at email in a file based system, and then to transfer email. We had to have people that worked 24x7 to literally reboot these dos based mailmen. I tell the above story to say that I don’t believe in this idea that customers are going to build their own software for companies and stop using Saas based systems or third party software. While AI companies want to push this idea, they are really pushing themselves as the solution to a problem that really doesn't exist. I don't see where customers should staff up the necessary technical expertise to host their own applications, because when you take on your application it must be hosted somewhere and that is up to the company/customer. I’ve seen no evidence of customers building their own solutions to commodity problems. If they are doing it, i don’t know that and they aren’t prepared for the complexity and cost of what is going to happen. If a company is going to write their own software and not use Saas based systems, they need to think about the above story and all of the hidden costs. There tend to be a lot of hidden costs that they don’t see coming until the commitment is made. I also want to be clear that I believe that AI can help with tasks. I don't see it as taking over. Btw, from what I hear, Coca-Cola has a commodity smtp email system now, probably based on Microsoft Exchange Server, but I don't know that.