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AI could replace apps as the main way people use technology, said Meta’s chief technology officer.
Right now, people pick out software from “a garden of applications,” Andrew Bosworth said on a podcast episode published Thursday by venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. The firm was an early Facebook investor.
Instead of opening a specific app, like Spotify, to listen to music, Bosworth said he’d rather just tell an AI what he wants and have it handle the rest. Spotify did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
“I don’t want to be responsible for orchestrating what app I’m opening to do a thing,” he said. “We’ve had to do that because that’s how things were done in the entire history of digital computing.”
This shift, Bosworth said, could turn the app model on its head — and that may be great for users, but a nightmare for some companies.
“It abstracts away a lot of companies’ brand names, which I think is going to be very hard for an entire generation of brands,” he said.
Brands “want me to have an attachment. I don’t want to have an attachment,” he added.
That could upend the ways apps like Spotify and Netflix monetize their services, whether through ad revenue, subscriptions, or “freemium” models that offer a free core product with paid tiers for premium features.
Software services ‘squeezed’ by AI
The rise of reasoning models and AI agents is beginning to erode the core assumptions that have defined the software-as-a-service business model for decades, Business Insider reported on Monday.
A study released by consulting firm AlixPartners said this was affecting more than 100 midmarket software companies.
AlixPartners said these companies are caught in a “big squeeze,” pressured on one side by nimble, AI-native entrants that can replicate applications at a fraction of the cost and on the other by tech behemoths, such as Microsoft and Salesforce, that are pouring billions of dollars into the AI arms race.
“We believe many midsize enterprise software companies will face threats to their survival over the next 24 months,” the firm added. It declined to identify specific companies.
Ultimately, Bosworth thinks this shift from a smattering of apps to a powerful AI interface is worth it.
“That’s net positive because what matters now is performance on the job and price per performance,” Bosworth said. “A lot of companies won’t love that,” he added.
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