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Benedict Evans Argues AI Won't Skip the Institutionalization Step That Created SaaS in the First Place
In a 2026-09-03 essay, Evans pushes against the assumption that agents collapse enterprise software by making tooling cheap. His claim is that the value in SAP, Workday, Carta and Rippling was never the code, it was moving a workflow out of improvised spreadsheets and email into an institutionalized system, and that step is organizational change consultancies get paid for, not a code-generation problem. He names HCM, sales enablement, legal discovery and voice analytics as the categories where this distinction decides who actually gets displaced.
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