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Benedict Evans: the "just ask the model to build the tool" thesis misreads where enterprise software actually comes from
Evans' 2026-09-03 essay pushes back on the idea that AI sweeps away the hundreds or thousands of applications, scripts and spreadsheets inside a large company. His argument is that most people are not tool-builders and do not instinctively reframe how their own job could be done — a great matrimonial lawyer thinks about cases and clients, not about discovery software — which is why Excel needed onboarding flows, assistants and templates to bridge the gap. The counterweight to the current agent-tooling optimism is that the bottleneck is organizational change, not the cost of building the tool.
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