AI lowers the threshold for building tools, but that is not where business transformation stalls

Anyone can now have a tool built in five minutes by asking a model, without writing a line of code. That feels like a breakthrough if you build tools for a living. Most people do not. As Benedict Evans puts it, a great lawyer spends the day thinking about the case and the client, not about which software would make that work faster. So the bottleneck sits somewhere else: in seeing that there is something to automate at all, and in working out what the right solution actually is. That second part is rarely obvious. It can take years and several failed attempts before someone finds the right shape for a problem. Even with the right tool in hand, the work is not done. A process touching fifty to five hundred people across departments and systems stops being an individual decision and becomes a purchasing project that runs for months. Software moves on a sliding scale between improvised (a spreadsheet, an email) and institutionalised (a system with audit, security and ownership), and a…