There’s a kind of person who pops up in every AI discussion thread: while someone is running the numbers on how many jobs are going to evaporate in the next five years, these folks are cheerfully explaining why their company’s 47-step Jira-to-Salesforce automation is truly one of a kind and simply cannot be replaced by a standard tool. You know the type.

They’re not entirely wrong about AI. It probably will eat a good chunk of business software and SaaS alive, eventually. But their reasoning about why their setup is special is almost always catastrophically misguided.

Here’s the thing: you don’t want a custom solution. You think you do, but you don’t.

The Excel Problem

Think about Microsoft Excel for a moment. It is, by any reasonable measure, a deeply mediocre piece of software. Its formula syntax is an archaeological dig through decades of bad decisions. Its date system is famously broken in ways that will never be fixed because too many spreadsheets depend on the bug. It crashes, it does weird things with leading zeros, and no one can agree on whether it’s a database or not.

And yet.

You hire someone – anyone, from literally anywhere – and there’s a decent chance they’ve used Excel before. Not just opened it once, but actually used it. Pivot tables, VLOOKUPs, the whole disaster. Your ancient accounting software from the early 2000s? It can export to Excel. Your shiny new whatever-as-a-service platform that your CTO is very excited about? It exports to Excel. The janky internal tool your previous contractor left behind with no documentation? Somehow, against all odds, it exports to Excel.

This is not a coincidence.

Standards Win, Always Most of the Time

A custom solution means you own all of it: the code, the quirks, the institutional knowledge baked into the heads of two specific people who are definitely going to leave. A standard tool means that knowledge is already out there, distributed across the workforce, documented in a thousand Stack Overflow threads, and probably the subject of a YouTube tutorial uploaded in 2016 that still works.

And Then AI Showed Up

Now layer AI on top of this. Everyone is very excited about AI obliterating SaaS vendors, because why pay 5 bucks a month for a good-enough solution when you can spend 10k on AI tokens and vibe-code your own? And sure, some of that will be genuinely useful. But most of it is going to age about as well as that PHP monolith your team has been “planning to rewrite” since PHP 3.5.

The tools that will actually stick are the ones that become the new Excel. The ones where, five years from now, you can hire someone and assume they’ve touched it. The ones your ERP can export to, and your next ERP can import from. The ones with an ecosystem wide enough that someone else has already solved your specific problem.

Custom AI solutions are fun to demo. Standard ones are fun to build your business on.

The Actual Point

None of this means you should never build anything. Sometimes the standard tool genuinely doesn’t fit, and you have a real, defensible reason to roll your own. But that bar is higher than most people think, and the cost of being wrong is paid slowly, in the form of onboarding new hires, debugging undocumented logic, and explaining to your successor why everything works the way it does.

So yes, AI will probably reshape a lot of things. But the teams that quietly stick to boring, well-understood, widely-supported tools are going to spend a lot less time on tribal knowledge and a lot more time on actual work.

But Excel will still be there when the universe ends.