AI Made Enterprise Software Cheaper To Prove. Here’s How I’m Adapting As A Marketing Leader

Tobias Fischer founded HigherUp Digital (B2B Tech Agency), Sermondo (Enterprise Tech Media), and is VP Marketing at Euvic US (Software Dev).

Two years ago, almost everyone I talked to expected AI to shrink the software engineering market. Cheaper code would mean fewer engineers and less spend.

It went the other way. The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics projects employment of software developers, QA analysts and testers to grow 10% from 2025 to 2035, “much faster than the average for all occupations.” Gartner forecasts worldwide IT spending of $6.37 trillion in 2026, up 14.2%.

This is Jevons paradox. In 1865, economist William Stanley Jevons observed that more efficient steam engines increased Britain’s coal consumption rather than reducing it. When something gets cheaper to use, we use more of it. The question for software is which part actually got cheaper.

What AI Actually Made Cheaper: Proving A Project Is Worth Building

I’m vice president of Marketing at Euvic US, a software development and IT services group with more than 6,000 people. Over the past 18 months, the question prospects bring up has changed. They used to ask, “Is this worth building?” Now many arrive with a prototype built in days and ask, “Can you make this real?”

The bottleneck was never writing code. It was the months of committee work needed to justify a build. AI prototyping removed most of that, so projects that sat in the “someday” column for years are getting approved. Software didn’t get much cheaper to finish. It got much cheaper to prove, and every approved idea still has to become a production system.

AI Can Build The Prototype, But Making It Enterprise-Ready Is Still Hard

Delivery moves only as fast as its slowest stage. That is why DX’s longitudinal study puts the average gain in engineering output at around 10%.

Security widens the gap. Veracode’s “2025 GenAI Code Security Report“ found that 45% of AI code-generation tasks introduced a vulnerability.