Yeah, that line came across as a little out of touch. I work for US DOTs, and a yearly allotment from a STIP of a small DOT is still measured in billions. Software spend is negligible. In fact, I would say software was always costly in terms of labor, but hasn’t been capital intensive until recently.

But I would like to agree with what you said with respect to SaaS spending coming under scrutiny. Our technical experts are becoming aware that we spend 5 or 6-figure sums on software with barely any users that we can clone with a coding agent in an afternoon. Eventually management will find out too and we’re going to cut a lot of dead weight.

the SaaS isn't going anywhere. you're going to AI yourself a Tier 4 data center and all of the requisite generators and UPS systems.

And how do you put liability on an LLM agent? I outsource to SaaS and consultants because 1) they're good at what they do, and 2) if they do it wrong I can sue them, escalate, berate them in social media, etc. and get things fixed; the AI pulls from so many places who is responsible? How do I validate that?

I blackbox that I can't audit is a lot of risk compared to expensive consultants with shortcomings.

100%.

A modern pharmaceutical manufacturing plant costs two-billion dollars just to build, and that doesn't include developing a drug to actually manufacture there, or a distribution network to sell what you make inside it.