AI Is Making Software Cheap to Build. Is Your Organization Ready for What Comes Next?
CIO.com, Wednesday, October 7th, 2026
As AI collapses software build costs, CIOs must rethink buy-vs-build, backlog prioritization and SaaS spending.
Enterprise IT structures such as SaaS buying, backlog prioritization and budget competition exist largely because software has been expensive to build.
At Perplexity, two engineers with hundreds of AI coding agents built CobbleDB, a 40,000-line Rust key-value store now serving production traffic, in about two months, while Payhawk replaced a $70,000-a-year commercial tool with AI-built software and Microsoft is pushing app building to all employees.
The piece explores what cheap software means for CIO budgets, governance and the build-versus-buy calculus, including maintenance burdens.