I Replaced Almost $750,000 in Salaries With AI. Here's What It Means for Your Business

I've been a systems engineer for 16 years. In that time I spent every year building real solutions for real businesses, and watching an endless parade of mediocre software come out, take people's money, and make them feel like it was the only way to get anything done.

It wasn't. It isn't.

Why has software been so expensive for so long?

For years, a lot of software was built the same way. Investors poured money into products, launched them with a big marketing budget and a slick interface, charged everyone monthly forever, and called it innovation.

The software wasn't necessarily better. It was better funded. And business owners paid for it every month, whether it worked well for them or not.

The reason most owners felt they had no other option is that building your own solutions used to be genuinely hard. I know because I did it for a living.

What did it used to take?

I ran a team with more than $750,000 a year in salaries, just to build better infrastructure for companies that couldn't get off-the-shelf software to do what they needed.

That's what it took. Developers, project managers, quality testing and the coordination to hold it all together. For most service businesses, that kind of investment was completely out of reach, so they rented whatever the platforms offered and lived with the limits.

What changed

I've now replaced almost all of the work that team did with AI.

That's not a statement about people being worthless. It's a statement about how much the cost of building has collapsed. The barrier that kept you dependent on someone else's platform, the cost, the complexity and the need for a full engineering team, is mostly gone.

AI didn't just change what's possible. It changed who gets to do it.

What AI replaced, and what it didn't

The part AI replaced was the manual labor of building. Writing the code, setting up the pages, connecting one system to another, and doing the repetitive work that used to take a team weeks.

The part it didn't replace is knowing what to build. Someone still has to understand the business, decide what the system needs to do, see how the pieces connect, and know when something is wrong. That's the difference between a developer and a system architect, and it's the part that matters most now.

So the real shift isn't "AI does everything." It's that one person with clear thinking and the right direction can now get done what used to require a whole department.

What does this mean for a service business owner?

You're probably paying monthly for several tools that are simple layers built on top of infrastructure you could access yourself. A website builder, a course platform, a reporting dashboard, a sales page tool. Each one made sense when building your own wasn't realistic.

Now it often is. That doesn't mean you should rebuild everything tomorrow. Some tools are genuinely complex, hold sensitive data, or do their job so well that keeping them is the smart call. But for the simple ones, the question has changed from "Can we afford to build this?" to "Why are we still renting this?"

It also changes how you think about staffing. Before you hire someone to do repetitive work, it's worth asking whether that work should be done by a person at all.

What's the question to ask now?

The question I come back to is simple: what do I actually need?

Not what the ad says. Not what the guy in your mastermind uses. What does your business need to function, grow and stay under your control? Bruce Lee put it better than I can: "Absorb what is useful. Discard what is useless. Add what is uniquely your own."

The owners who own their stack make decisions. The ones who rent it make requests.

How to think about it in your own business

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