Software ate the world, Google is eating software

In August 2011, Marc ANDRESSEN was famously forewarning us in the Wall Street Journal that software is eating the world. Since then his prediction came to full realization and whether you call it the web, digital, or data, software indeed ate the world. But yesterday, at its annual developper’s conference, Google showed us how they will be eating software:

As much as we’ve been talking about artificial intelligence, there is this usual thing with innovation: we see it coming, but we don’t really understand it until it’s there. Now we start to know how Google and AI will start to eat the world within a dozen of month or so.

Bear with me here. Past the obvious utility of the service for consumers you understand that it means that small businesses won’t need to really go through their digital transformation anymore. No more need for apps, websites or Facebook page to interact with customers when Google will intermediate seamlessly. Rapidly, this logic will propagate to Fortune 100 companies. Replacing crappy call centers, dumb chatbots or interns managing corporate Twitter accounts, there will be even more incentive to rely on this service at scale.

This is leading us in a world where Google pretty much removes the need of platforms, apps or websites to interact with customers. Or if not really remove them, at least transfer the value to Google anyway when your corporate Facebook page is managed by their AI.

We are talking AdWords to the next exponential level, embedded in every piece of software (yes, including soon-to-be self-driving vehicles).

Let alone Google AI will be to software what the cloud was to servers.

Unless… China.