"We're not going to see software disappear from the corporate world"
Dr. Ben Haklai, National Technology Officer at Microsoft Israel, said at the Microsoft AI Tour Tel Aviv 2026 conference: "Open source has been around for decades, and we are still seeing massive growth in software categories in the corporate world. I see no reason to think that this trend will look any different in the world of AI."
Despite the AI panic that has led to a collapse in the shares of software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies in recent months, “we are not going to see software disappear from the corporate world,” said Dr. Ben Haklai, National Technology Officer at Microsoft Israel, at the Microsoft AI Tour Tel Aviv 2026 conference.
“We are talking about very significant tools, and there is no doubt that we are at the threshold of an industrial revolution based on artificial intelligence,” said Haklai. “Organizations have never bought code. Think about it this way: if organizations only bought code, we would see massive open-source deployments under every green tree today. That’s not the case. Organizations buy managed software, controlled software, software that meets regulatory and compliance requirements, and software that provides a specific solution to a need. Today, there is no reason to think AI will change that. If anything, it reinforces it. Those same organizations will continue to adopt enterprise software. I don’t see a world in which organizations develop all kinds of significant internal tools using vibe coding.”
You are still speaking from a position. Microsoft is a software company that sells software mainly to enterprises.
“Microsoft is indeed one of the largest software providers to enterprises in the world, but I don’t think that comes from a position, it comes from a deeper understanding of the market. Look at the trends we have seen in software: open source has been around for decades; it’s not something new, and yet we are still in an arena where there is no dominant shift away from enterprise software. In fact, we are seeing massive growth in enterprise software categories. I see no reason to think this trend will look any different in the AI world.”
In the last two years, the traditional use of AI in organizations has been in the form of chatbots. We are now at a turning point with the rise of agentic AI. How will this change the adoption and deployment of AI in organizations?
“When we look at organizations today and where they are in this journey, we will move toward a world where humans manage groups of agents and have to give them direction, supervision, and ultimately evaluate their outputs. The role of humans is not going to disappear, but there will be a significant redesign of the work environment. We will see organizations moving along an axis from using chatbots to introducing agentic capabilities into workflows, a world where humans manage processes and groups of agents operating within their environment. That transition is already happening in steady steps.”
Employees are very concerned about the introduction of AI into organizations. How does this change the status of the employee in the organization?
“I’m a big optimist about the world of work, even in the age of AI. When I look at the future, I always look back at history and try to learn from previous technological revolutions. We’ve seen many areas where new tools have disrupted the labor market, and I assume we’ll see significant disruption here as well. On the other hand, humans have always been able to do much more with these tools. I think that’s what we’ll see here, and on steroids. We’ll see a world where humans have extremely powerful tools and teams of agents, giving them the ability to do far more than they do today. We’ve effectively raised the level of abstraction. Think about the transition from assembly-line work to much more abstract levels of software development, we’ve seen far more significant code creation. We saw something similar in education with the introduction of calculators, and suddenly there were major protests by teachers in the United States at the time who said mathematics would disappear. That’s not what happened, in fact, the opposite. I see no reason to think this time will be any different from previous revolutions.”
AI is coming in not as a tool that replaces the worker, but as a tool that empowers them.
“Absolutely. We see that individual workers can do much more because they have the tools to do so. Productivity will increase significantly and at a higher level of abstraction. We will be able to accomplish much more because we have far more powerful tools than we use today.”
