Picture the scene: you're trapped in a sales meeting with the Silicon Valley Tech Co, and you're being bombarded with enough hot air to inflate a zeppelin.
A shiny-shoed grad - desperate to justify his existence - wades into the babble with some confounding spiel about how their point-and-click wizardry will have your system up and running before you can say "utter balderdash."
And you nod pensively in agreement because the the alternative is the seemingly fearsome prospect of a custom build.
But once the ink dries on that devilish contract, the dream quickly sours into a disheartening reality.
The Reality
Behold! Your shiny new spaceship comes with a manual. A manual with 750,000 pages.
Overwhelmed, you're left with two options:
Hand it to some poor intern and pray for divine intervention. Spoiler alert: you'll probably end up forking out five times the original cost to repair the carnage it wreaks on your life.
Hire your own team (more on this later) or find some consulting help. Which brings us to the next great illusion of clicks over code.
Consulting Costs
Ever wondered what Silicon Valley Tech Co’s implementation partners charge for a consultant? In most cases, it's the same as what they'd charge for a developer.
Because it requires years of experience and in-depth knowledge to get it right first time.
So your point-and-click 'savings' vanish like a magician's assistant, swallowed by £1000-1700 daily rates for implementing or improving your existing setup.
Skills Scarcity
Unless the world economy collapses, there's a perpetual drought of skilled individuals in the market. So, you'll be duking it out with cash-flashing competitors to build your dream team. Trust me, it's far easier to hunt down skilled Javascript developers than those fluent in Salesforce or Oracle.
AI To The Rescue
AI will mitigate most of these pain points. The future is custom.
Custom, proprietary systems generated by AI.
Sounds weird? Sounds like it contradicts all the principles of Web2.0?
Well, consider this: we've already seen an onslaught of AI website generators, video and image creators, AutoGPT, Code Interpreter, and tons of other new developments in the last year.
We've already seen people with no coding skills use ChatGPT to build things they couldn't build a year ago.
The next step is the automated creation of highly-personalised business information systems that:
Are built completely in custom code using AI prompts
Are customised using natural language
Give businesses complete flexibility in UI design
Do not shoehorn businesses into an off-the-shelf architecture
Move businesses towards true technology ownership
Allow for quicker and more cost-effective technology transformation
Require less integration by using a single or small number of data stores
Still don't believe me? Try Moshun.cc for an CRM-flavoured example of AI-generated business applications, and I'm sure there will be more like this emerging in the coming months.