Quick answer: Because nobody wants to be the one who put it in wrong. At the Amsterdam AI Summit, Eugene Volkov saw the same pattern everywhere: pilots, guardrails, “let’s see how Q1 goes.” Everyone wants AI in. Meanwhile the developer job quietly changed. Talk to the business, pin down requirements, design the architecture, build it, ship it, QA it yourself. The one-person orchestra is now the entry ticket. Teams of 1 to 3 are delivering what used to take 10 to 15. At that size there’s no room for a learning curve and nobody else to catch a wrong call. Maybe that’s why the caution makes sense. If you’re building with AI right now: how big is your team, and how many hats does each person wear?
The shallow lesson: the cautious companies are behind
Some are. Most have simply noticed that a small team has no safety net.
The real lesson: small teams raise the price of every individual judgment
Great tech skills alone aren’t enough anymore. Companies want people who already understand their industry, because nobody has six months to spend learning how a bank works before writing the first line of code.
The sobering part
When three people do the work of fifteen, one wrong call is a third of the team being wrong. The speed is real, and so is the exposure.
Full disclosure: this is the direction Azati is leaning into: small teams, close to the problem, with real industry context, owning the outcome end to end. So we have a stake in this being true. See our project work.
FAQ
Adapted from a LinkedIn post by Eugene Volkov, Chief Commercial Officer at Azati Software – read the original, written after the Amsterdam AI Summit.
