Software Does Not Create Any Value

“What? What do you mean software doesn’t create value? Look around! Our entire world is built on software! How can it be that one of the major foundations of our society is valueless? Even more: you’re a software engineer. So why would you say that the thing you build all day is worthless?”

Working on software implementations has made me think deeply about the place of software in the world. And in my thinking I stumbled upon a truth that is not immediately obvious.

Software itself does not create any value. It only contains potential value.

Firstly, this doesn’t apply to all software. You can download an app off the App Store, go through an onboarding flow, and the time-to-value in most cases is optimized to be less than 5 minutes.

But this strategy doesn’t work for more complex software. It especially does not work in the real world where that software has to interact with organizations of more than 20 people. You can create the most powerful software ever, but if nobody knows how to use it, it will not produce any value. So how does software become valuable?

Software is only valuable when it aligns with the way people actually do work in the real world.

Anyone who makes a complex software product themselves intuitively understands this. You can have the best onboarding flow and UX, but your product is useless without deployment. The deployment process is what makes the software actually useful. Without it, you end up with confused customers who churn quickly when they can’t figure out how to use your product for their use cases.

This happens because software doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Organizations already have their own way of doing things. It’s very rare for an organization to adopt a new piece of software without it clashing with their preexisting workflows. Without implementation, it can be impossible for an organization to adopt new software, no matter how powerful it is.

After discovering this, it became clear that implementation is not only preferable but necessary, which uncovered a deeper truth.

It’s the implementation process that actually gives software value. Without it, software is useless.

We are currently witnessing one of the greatest transformations in how work is done within organizations. Businesses are hungry for software that’s going to make them AI-native, but that software won’t create any value unless it aligns with how they already do work. It won’t matter what models you choose or how many subagents you deploy. Without that alignment, the software is useless.

Auctor sits at the heart of this change. Imagine a world where an organization adopts new software and it begins to produce value virtually overnight. No more long implementation processes where you have to join 20 calls in a month just to get a proposal. Just pick a product and it immediately starts driving value in the business. This is what Auctor enables.

People always ask me: “But what does Auctor actually do.”

Auctor gives software value.