If Only Wizards Can Install Your Software, You Will Run Out of Business

The question on the table was whether rolling out artificial intelligence will still need consultants, and whether there are enough smart ones to do the work. A co-host said businesses need consultants even more as artificial intelligence spreads.

But those consultants, in the co-host's telling, "have to be smarter than they used to be." He recalled partner agencies that once helped with big deployments of workplace tools such as Jira and Confluence. That took smarts, he said, but not the smarts to train an agent from scratch, meaning an AI program that carries out tasks on its own.

That gap, the co-host argued, "is why customer success is dead." Many business software companies are trying to turn their customer success teams, the staffers who help clients use software, into deployment experts who can install AI. He doubted even 10 percent could make that jump from coaching users to working like product engineers.

That warning set up Mike Cannon-Brookes, the co-founder of software company Atlassian. His answer was that software makers cannot depend on a few brilliant installers. As he put it, if only wizards, his word for those rare expert installers, can roll out your product, "you're going to run out of wizards and then you're going to run out of revenue."

So for mass adoption, he argued, you need mass simplification, with guardrails built in so ordinary people can use the product. The incentive, he said, sits with the software provider to make the product adoptable by ordinary people.

His example came from Atlassian's own customers. Most of those customers deploying agents on their own, he said, start with relatively simple tools, small automations that speed up one task a bit. That may look minor, he said, but it is "a major leap in their learning" as they release the tools slowly and learn what the technology can and cannot do. He called that a normal, and very early, pattern of corporate adoption.