Like breakfast at a diner, software is cheap & fast to make. Ask for a new task management tool & you’ll have the first version in less time & for less money than an omelette.
AI-built tools may not last long. Some survive only a few minutes, long enough to answer “What’s our turnaround time this week?”
Others remain useful for a few days or weeks, like an app that can spin up a lightweight project tracker for onboarding Walmart. Sometimes they persist beyond a month.
If permanence defined the last two decades of software, impermanence may define the next.
We now see three layers forming along a continuum:
Durable SaaS: long-lived systems of record like a pipeline dashboard.
Ephemeral Apps: short-lived tools like the Walmart onboarding project tracker.
Instant Questions: one-off queries such as “Tell me about the Apple account.”
By orders of magnitude, ephemeral apps & instant questions will outnumber SaaS applications, perhaps millions to one. The dopamine high of instant problem-solving is addictive & accelerates careers.
Underpinning all of these applications will be a system of record, often an existing platform but increasingly a new one.
Finance & operations teams depend on persistent dashboards for governance & reporting, as if the definition of a metric could be standardized across the organization. Marketers spin up data apps that last a few months to analyze their paid spend performance, & support teams ask quick questions about turnaround time before moving on.
The trusted models, permissions, & business logic of an underlying BI platform like Omni give users confidence to experiment with ephemeral apps & instant questions. Control of the foundation ensures control of the layers above.
This design pattern extends beyond AI to most other software.
Whether you’ll have a coffee, an omelette, or a five-course meal, the next great startup will serve it all.