AI made building easy

Everyone can build software now. The tools are extraordinary and getting better every quarter. A team of three people with the right AI tooling can ship in weeks what used to take a team of 30 a year to deliver. This is real, and it is happening across every industry I work in, from retail to healthcare to financial services. The gap between the best digital products and the worst is getting wider. The barriers to building have collapsed, and the standard for what people will actually use and stay loyal to has gone up. When there are 20,000 versions of the same product, the features comparable, the interfaces similar, the subscription tiers nearly identical, what stops someone from using yours on Monday and switching to a competitor by Friday? The answer, in every case I have seen, is coherence. Coherence is the degree to which every part of an organization, its product, its people, its positioning, and its decisions move in the same direction at the same time. It operates above design and above brand, though it touches both. For the companies that are accelerating right now, coherence is the separating factor. Teams of three supersede teams of 3,000, because coherence is easier with a smaller group. THE WRONG METRIC Most of the conversation around AI in product development focuses on speed. Ship faster. Automate more. Reduce headcount. I walked the floor of a major AI conference recently. Nearly every booth was selling the same promise: Your workforce is the problem, and AI is the fix. The pitch varied in polish. The premise did not. The premise: Building software was the hard part, and AI has made it easier. The premise is wrong. Building was always the easy part. Understanding what to build, for whom, and why they should care has always been the hard part, and it has gotten harder. Most executives I talk to know this already. They feel it in the gap between what their teams can produce and what their customers actually value. When anyone can produce an app in 20