Posey's Tips & Tricks
How Software Will Evolve Because of AI
AI-driven automation is poised to simplify traditional software management while shifting IT pros toward higher-level responsibilities in compliance, integration and data governance.
Having recently built a custom line of business application that partially relies on AI, I have been spending a lot of time lately thinking about what software might look like in the future as a result of AI integration. More specifically, I have been thinking about how AI is going to shape traditional IT tasks such as configuring, managing and troubleshooting software.
It has been said that history doesn't repeat itself, but it sure does rhyme. As such, I think that we can get a glimpse of what to expect by looking at the past. By doing so, my guess is that in the future, complex software is going to become far simpler, but there will be other things for IT pros to focus on.
One of the reasons why I believe that software will become simpler over time is because there is a long history of improvements in technology causing certain configuration options to go away. Let me give you a technology related, but not PC related, example from long ago.
When I was a kid, flat screen TVs didn't exist. We all had those insanely heavy, boxy tube TVs. One of the things that I remember about my parent's television back then was that it had a million different adjustment knobs. At the time, the images that appeared on television screens were notorious for "rolling," and so there was a vertical hold knob that you could use to lock the image in place when the picture would start to roll. There were also knobs for individually adjusting the red, green and blue, as well as a brightness knob and a contrast knob. And because televisions were analog at the time, turning the dial to a specific channel did not always deliver optimal results. As such, there was a knob for fine tuning a channel, just in case the channel dial was a little bit "off".
Now, fast forward to today and with the possible exception of brightness and contrast, none of these options exist (and haven't existed in ages). Improvements in technology made most of the adjustments completely unnecessary. From a user interface perspective, the TVs that exist today are a lot simpler than the ones from way back when. Yes, the argument could be made that there are settings related to connecting a modern TV to Wi-Fi, downloading streaming apps and that sort of thing. However, these options tend to only be used during the initial setup. They aren't something that you have to mess around with every time that you watch TV.
The second example that I want to talk about is Software as a Service (SaaS). SaaS also did a lot to simplify things. Let's use Microsoft Exchange as an example.
Prior to Microsoft 365, Exchange Server was only supported for on-premises use. Exchange Server was tough to deploy (some versions were worse than others) because there was a long list of prerequisites and in many cases, there were prerequisites to the prerequisites. More importantly, deploying Exchange Server according to Microsoft's best practices required major architectural planning and it also meant spending a lot of time making adjustments and configuration changes at various levels of the software stack. Unfortunately, Microsoft's best practices were constantly evolving, so organizations had to continually rethink their Exchange Server deployments.
Today of course, Exchange Server is part of Microsoft 365 and delivered as a service. While there are still configuration options available, Microsoft has done all of the architectural planning and low-level configuration for you. Just as modern televisions no longer include adjustments that were commonplace in the 1970s, Microsoft 365 does not expose low level Exchange Server configuration options, because those options are no longer necessary.
This is exactly what I believe is going to happen to software as AI integration becomes increasingly commonplace. Eventually, I think that many of the configuration settings that we find on menus or in dialog boxes today are going to go away. Instead, admins will be able to use a chat interface to tell the software what they want to do, and the software will simply make the change, without any need for exposing manual configuration controls to the admin.
This of course, raises the question of whether admins will even be needed in the future. However, I don't think that administrative controls are going to completely go away. They will probably look quite different than what we have today. Modern televisions still offer a plethora of internal settings, but those settings are vastly different from those found on TVs from 50 years ago. Similarly, SaaS applications like Exchange Server still contain lots of configuration options, but the types of options that exist are different from those found in older versions of Exchange.
My guess is that going forward, software publishers might try to eliminate manual controls related to tuning or related to day-to-day administration. Instead, we are likely to see rich controls related to compliance, integration with other software, privacy and analytics take their place.
About the Author
Brien Posey is a 22-time Microsoft MVP with decades of IT experience. As a freelance writer, Posey has written thousands of articles and contributed to several dozen books on a wide variety of IT topics. Prior to going freelance, Posey was a CIO for a national chain of hospitals and health care facilities. He has also served as a network administrator for some of the country's largest insurance companies and for the Department of Defense at Fort Knox. In addition to his continued work in IT, Posey has spent the last several years actively training as a commercial scientist-astronaut candidate in preparation to fly on a mission to study polar mesospheric clouds from space. You can follow his spaceflight training on his Web site.