AI also gives employees much more leverage than before, as they no longer need a large team to compete with BigCos at knowledge work. It's never been cheaper to start a software business.
For example, skills with sales are far more important than actual software engineering.
Just today I was served a clearly AI-generated Halloween ad for Coca-Cola.
99.99% of software business is marketing..lol
The ability to rent cheap AI capacities, the ability to push to a million consumers, the ability to persuade for large contracts, these are the most important ones.
If the coding was nothing, every good marketing guy could go solo and start large software businesses. It does not happen. You mostly see successful technical founders, or usually a marriage of technical and business cofounders.
Finding a fit between viable business opportunities and the tech to address it is what's hard, and requires several skills: technical, marketing, communication, product design, etc.
There's an alternate employment arrangement...
I expect some BRUTAL competition for these larger software companies. My company just recently replaced our CRM with an in-house tool. (Of course, the maintenance / buildout of that is costly, but it's eventually going to be less than we are paying for the third-party CRM)
Honestly, I cannot personally decide whether or not this is Jevon's Paradox in action or not. In theory, that software could be entirely hands off (Claude write me a 1:1 implementation of Salesforce CRM and make it never go down) but in reality, someone is going to want it tweaked, modified, changed, and thus we now have an internal CRM that we own that requires some level of expertise. Maybe it's not a software engineer, but a software engineer is probably the most well equipped to take that process over...
Who knows, though.