A Few Reflections On Watching AI Change B2B Technology

Yoav Kutner is the Co-Founder of OroCommerce, a B2B-focused commerce platform for manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors.

When building gets easier, deciding what to build becomes more important.​

I’ve watched how software development has changed for a long time. When I started in technology in the 1990s, a company’s entire IT department could be one person. That person built the software, maintained it and carried most of the knowledge about how it worked.​

We may be heading toward a version of that again. AI makes it possible for one person or a small team to create software that once would have required a much larger development team. The barrier to building something new is getting lower, and the number of things we can build is going up.​

That makes decisions about what we build and how we build it more important, not less. Here are a few reflections from what I’ve seen so far.

Don’t Make The Business Chase AI​

Every new AI capability creates another decision for companies. One model gets better at coding, another at reasoning, another at multimodal tasks. If your business sells industrial equipment, you shouldn’t have to become an AI expert just to keep your technology current.​

Your team has a business to run. You only have so much time to spend evaluating new models and deciding what needs to change every time something new comes along.​

The technology underneath the business needs to keep pace. Core systems can remain stable while you introduce new AI capabilities where they make sense. The business gets the benefit of better technology without rethinking its operations every few months.​

AI will keep changing. The foundation underneath the business has to be built for that reality.

Use AI For What It Does Best

The question, then, is where AI can do the job well enough to trust it. ​

So, yes, experiment with AI. Just keep in mind that getting something to work is different from figuring out how it should work as part of a larger system.