Platform Strategies 2025: How AI is Transforming Platform Strategy

It has been said that software ate the world. Now, AI is coming to eat software. AI models are becoming disproportionately stronger in domains with easily verifiable solutions, such as mathematics and formal reasoning. Software programming is likewise a bounded domain with strong reward signals for models to self-learn. It’s now possible to generate entire toy applications from a single prompt. The very nature of software development is about to get turned on its ear and it’s likely that at progressive companies, humans will be writing only a small fraction of code commits within 5 years. It’s early days in this rapid transformation, but the direction of travel is clear. On-platform, AI functionality is drastically changing the user experience through workflow improvements, improved discovery, and added capabilities. Finally, we're seeing disintermediation trends in traffic patterns as humans increasingly use agentic AI to search and synthesize primary literature. In other words, AI is changing platforms from both ends—where does that leave us?