"WIll it? 1) Assess a business opportunity, design, and develop, deploy, and operate an entire technology solution?" At all of my software engineering jobs, I

"WIll it? 1) Assess a business opportunity, design, and develop, deploy, and operate an entire technology solution?" At all of my software engineering jobs, I only ever performed tasks that accomplished what one would consider a small fraction of one list item here -- "develop." So to answer your question, mostly no. You're describing something that an entrepreneur does, not a coder. "2) If not that, will it pick up at some part of the value chain above and be able to figure out how to do the rest?" Yes, the "develop"-ment (deployment is getting automated already -- Chef, Heroku, etc. -- and operate is also largely automated now thanks to things like cloud computing services). Case in point: Why did WhatsApp have so few employees for its billion users? Well, automation made launching a web startup (doing (1), as you described) a much leaner proposition. As you can see, AI is not a necessary condition for automation. I have no reason to believe these trends will reverse course.