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Once upon a time, software ate the world, and new forms of AI arrived to digest what software didn’t. The world where your applications catered for a narrow need, and needed expensive integrations to work with other applications is unravelling.

Many line-of-business solutions have, for too long, been a glorified filing cabinet. Applications were digital folders, self-contained, rigid, and walled off from one another. New ways of interacting with software through AI-based interfaces, pulling information from different sources and assembling answers are emerging.

Generative AI breaks that old filing cabinet metaphor. Instead of clicking and tapping through individual programs, users will interact with intelligent agents that dynamically retrieve, process and generate responses in real-time. Ask an AI assistant to book theatre tickets, check your credit card balance and recommend a workout routine? Tick. Need legal terms explained, whilst ordering your next grocery delivery? Tick. The new interface is not a narrowly focused application, soon it will be conversational, predictive and frictionless.

We’re not there just yet. LLMs are too much of a blank box, needing prompts - but all of the component parts are coming together. Your line-of-business applications won’t disappear or become useless overnight, but they will need to be de-siloed and connected to the coming AI-driven experiences, requiring software to be modular, dynamic and deeply integrated.

This will enable Vertical AI - tools that integrate a number of systems, providing new levels of service and user experience. The future of computing is not about one AI that does everything. It is about many specialised AI systems that know exactly what users need and execute flawlessly.

The platforms and businesses that fail to adapt may well be relegated to the history books, joining the ranks of those who dismissed the internet, mobile and cloud before it.