A function a company doesn’t compete on has a point of diminishing returns. Past “good enough”, the next dollar is better spent elsewhere.
This means demand for necessity work is capped by “good enough”, not by capacity. When a technology makes that work cheaper, companies don’t do more ambitious versions of it: they reach “good enough” faster and pocket the savings. Consumer brands did this when Shopify brought down the cost of building a store, and they’ll do it again with AI.
Cheaper execution does create some extra demand. Companies will review more contracts, produce more content, and answer more support tickets. But because necessities converge on the standard answer, the extra demand is for the standard answer, which AI can meet on its own.
Advantages have no such ceiling. There, cheaper execution raises the cost of not executing.