From Dark Factories to Dark Offices to No Offices
Who will Code the Coders?
A “Dark Factory” is a futuristic concept that didn’t even come from science fiction. It basically evolved from industrial practice and observation that automated equipment doesn’t need light to see. The original phrase was “lights-out manufacturing”. Which makes sense - if a factory is completely automated, with robots of various shapes and kinds doing the work, with sensors such as RADAR and LIDAR, light is optional.
The implication of the concept is that a “Dark Factory” doesn’t need humans.
A similar thing started happening in office space. Initially, it was because of “work from home” and geographical independence of team members, but now it’s also happening because of AI.
The IT industry is leading on that front. SaaS as a concept dying because:
a) everyone can code their own app for the thing they need (which I think still remains to be seen, because not everyone cooks, and that’s easier than coding), and
b) even if the amount of code produced globally is rising sharply, it could very well be a transitional phase, because some, or most of that code can be replaced by AI agents doing ad-hoc actions and analytics in response to prompts. As in: why create a reporting module for an app, if you can hook up Claude to a database and just tell it to pull and format your data. If you hook it to your CRM database and your e-mail, it can do end-to-end tasks with your clients.
Of course, what happens at your clients’ side is probably going to end up the same, with AI agents reading those e-mails and deciding what to do. In the end, some businesses might end up without offices at all - dark or not. AI data centres and databases could be enough.
At ThoughtLeaders, we’re preparing to launch something very cool in that direction: the UI is optional - why eyeball enormous report tables and click through intricate filters, when you can just ask Claude to make it happen?
Stay tuned…