We may be seeing the early signature of AI eating software from the inside. The margin expansion from 6% to 19% while growth halved looks like efficiency gains, but could equally reflect AI-driven productivity allowing companies to maintain output with fewer engineers, less support staff, and compressed development cycles.
Traditional analysis would attribute margin expansion to operational discipline, pricing power, or scale leverage. But the timing—coinciding with widespread AI tool adoption—suggests a different mechanism.
The AI Productivity Theory
If AI coding assistants, automated testing, and AI-powered support can replace human labor at the margin, companies can maintain or grow output while reducing headcount. The margin expansion becomes a second-order effect of AI capability gains.
What This Signals
If correct, this pattern will accelerate. Companies that have achieved margin expansion through AI productivity will reinvest those gains into further automation, creating a compounding effect that reshapes softwareindustryeconomics.
The growth slowdown may be temporary as companies redirect resources, or permanent as the industry matures. The margin expansion suggests the latter is being priced as acceptable.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
