Compete when intelligence is cheap: automate entire functions, revisit unit economics, and reinvest savings into differentiation.

Sep 29, 2025 6m 28s

Steve Brown

Expert Insights

Steve Brown asserts that the introduction of AI assistance in software development is akin to a new industrial era, where "intelligence" will become as universal and low-cost as electricity.

Driven by this perspective, Steve elucidates the inevitable economic shift set to reshape traditional software development structures, cost models, and business dynamics with AI at the helm.

Here are Steve's essential points:

Steve argues that AI's rapidly decreasing cost will result in digital employees.
This shift to cost-effective AI is not about reducing the workforce but about exploiting the newfound abundance of cost-efficient intelligence to innovate and increase productivity.
The successful companies will be those capitalizing on AI's potential to create previously impossible outcomes.
The intersection of HR and IT becomes inevitable as companies manage a blended workforce of human and artificial intelligence.
In this new 'electron economy', companies that delay the adoption of AI will place themselves at an economic disadvantage.
AI introduces a new layer of abstraction in coding, shifting from intense language-specific knowledge to problem-solving.

Digital employees essentially that will work for the cost of electrons. They'll work for electrons, not dollars and cents. And that changes the equation. Whenever you have an industrial era, it's typically because a general purpose technology like electricity... the cost of using those things goes down to a point where you don't really worry too much about how much they cost. If you could make your programmers, your development team 10 times more efficient, will you fire 90% of your development team or will you write 10 times as much code?

— Steve Brown, AI Futurist & fmr exec @ Google DeepMind & Intel

THE NEW DEFAULT angle

Here are actionable steps for teams navigating the transformation:

Embrace the shift to affordable AI: Recognize the inevitability of leveraging AI, not just for cost savings, but more importantly for the productivity and innovation it enables.
Re-imagine the roles of your development team: Align your team members towards problem-solving and strategic innovation while AI takes care of routine coding tasks.
Experiment more and fearlessly: Given that the cost of development significantly reduces with AI, take advantage of this to try out new features and innovations that were previously too costly to consider.
Balance build and buy decisions: Identify which AI solutions to develop in-house and which to purchase. Use bought solutions to avoid reinventing the wheel and focus the development team on delivering unique value to the product.
Merge organizational siloes: The line demarcating human and digital workforce blurs as AI becomes more integrated into your teams. Foster collaboration between HR and IT to manage this digital workforce efficiently.
Be on the front foot with AI adoption: Switch to a proactive stance in integrating AI into your software development processes, remembering that this shift is not just about economical coding but also about the potential to reimagine what software can be.
Condition your team for the transition: Prepare your team for another abstraction layer in coding brought on by AI, which requires problem-solving through software rather than an intense understanding of coding languages.