Throwing this out to the forum for input. I am also planning to write something to post on LinkedIn once I have my thoughts more organized.
AI has been all the rage for the past couple of years. I have been skeptical because it had the feel of just being the next tech hype cycle, or as I put it in a LinkedIn post during the 2023 SaaStr conference, “a solution looking for a problem”. I still believe it is a lot of hype, but the fact is that AI is where investors are putting their money. And I think the initial hype is settling into more focus on practical use cases where AI can be applied.
As it relates to Moqui I think the most important call out is the use of AI to build custom software. And if you want the AI to build a solution on a particular platform you have to train the model on the APIs and other technology used in the platform. I mentioned it in my LI post, “Software companies have something else they must market to now… the AI”, the Forbes article I posted below talks about using AI to build software, and I have heard other rumblings across the industry of companies choosing to roll their own rather than buy commercial software. These things go in cycles so we could be in the early stages of the pendulum swinging away from commercial, at least for some use cases.
The short version for Moqui is that I think there is an opportunity to increase Moqui adoption by virtue of “marketing” Moqui to AI models for code generation. But I am getting outside of my expertise here and I know others in the community have done some testing of this with Moqui.
More broadly I am seeing signals pop up in different places that on the surface may seem unrelated but I think are pointing to a larger shift in the software industry. The shift to SaaS is pretty far into its cycle, Salesforce and Netsuite originated in the late 1990s and by 2010 most software buyers were fully bought in. The tech gods have milked it about all they can so it is time to start telling everyone they need to spend money on tech in other ways. How else will we get IPOs with astronomical valuations 
Signals I am seeing:
- Talk of Small Language Models (SLM) that can be trained on smaller data sets, have lower computational demand, and are sufficient for dedicated use cases like customer support, generation of sales and marketing content, etc.
- Building custom software (using AI of course) as an alternative to traditional commercial options. There are some good reasons for this, for example if you are just trying to solve for a narrow use case and you don’t want to buy a complex system with many capabilities you don’t need. The AI aspect of it is being positioned as a cheaper, faster way to build software.
- Reduction in headcount - all of this is being positioned as a way to substantially reduce costs, particularly people.
- Software is a commodity - the Forbes article below goes so far as to say that there is no longer value in the software itself and it should rather be looked at as a way to gain competitive advantage in other industries.
Here is a post on LinkedIn about Salesforce using AI to generate Lightning user interfaces
And a Forbes article that crams a number of things together