Corporate America has been desperate to see a burst of productivity (i.e., cost cutting) emerging from the latest flood of agentic AI euphoria, and it is slowly starting to get it. Not everyone will be pleased.
Starbucks is developing in-house tools with the help of artificial intelligence that could replace some software applications it now buys from companies such as Microsoft and IBM.
According to Bloomberg, the coffee chain, whose stock price has gone nowhere in the past 3 years, is building alternatives to a Microsoft system that tracks inventory and an IBM tool that manages maintenance. Some of the Starbucks-developed software could roll out by the end of next year, pending the results of testing, the report notes.
Before the advent of advanced AI models, businesses were tethered for years to their technology vendors due to fear of business disruption and the complexity of building in-house tools. But AI is shifting that calculus as it makes it easier to develop applications from scratch and as companies push workers to use the technology (especially when it means those very same workers are teaching AI models how to do their work for them).
This is hardly new: at the start of 2026 the software sector cratered as Wall Street expressed doubts about the "terminal value" of business models that can easily be disrupted by AI. Since then, sentiment has stabilized but leading software companies still face concerns about whether they’ll be able to fend off competition from products built by upstarts, or their own customers, using AI. This phenomenon has weighed on software stocks this year, with Microsoft and IBM both trailing the S&P 500.
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