By Jo-An Occhipinti, Ante Prodan, Roy Green
Publication Date: 2026-03-14 18:00:00
In 2021, a minimum viable software product took a team of engineers three months to develop and cost about $50,000. In 2026, a single person with an artificial intelligence coding assistant can create the equivalent of a few thousand dollars in application programming interface costs in a weekend. McKinsey found that generative AI reduced developer task completion times for common coding activities by 20 to 45 percent.
Start with accounting. According to international standards, intangible assets must be written off if their book value exceeds their recoverable amount. If the cost of replicating a piece of software has fallen by a third to a half, the intellectual property on thousands of company balance sheets will be overvalued by a corresponding margin.
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