Artificial intelligence (AI) has fundamentally changed B2B enterprise software, becoming interwoven into the fabric of software development, integration and application, according to Paulo Matos, co-founder of autonomous enterprise AI platform Ageiro.
The start-up, established in early 2025, brings together six veteran leaders, including software architecture and development specialists. Its target market includes creators, agencies, channel partners and enterprise businesses.
Ageiro builds platform solutions designed to address friction points organisations encounter when introducing AI into software development operations. These friction points include efficiency losses from maintenance and limited available skills.
“Organisations are stuck in a cycle of that reactive maintenance, not proactive innovation," Matos says. "It’s a well-known statistic that in software development companies, over 60% of all investment in software goes to maintenance alone."
He adds speed-to-market and security to the list of challenges.
“The human element is still the biggest bottleneck in software development. That's just a fact. Also, you cannot be fast and secure… so, do you want fast, quick or cheap? You can only pick two, you can’t have three, right? We believe AI enables us to achieve all three.”
AI in action
Evidence of AI-infused software's impact is already visible in sectors like manufacturing. According to McKinsey, advanced AI adoption in manufacturing can deliver 20%-30% reductions in inventory and logistics costs, significant productivity gains and material improvements in quality and uptime – but only when scaled across operations rather than confined to pilots.
Matos notes that both McKinsey and Deloitte highlight how manufacturers deploying agentic AI are moving from insight generation to closed-loop execution, enabling faster cycle times, more resilient operations and sustained efficiency gains at enterprise scale.
Gartner research cited by Matos indicates that 62% of CEOs and senior executives identify AI as the technology that will define competitive advantage over the next decade. Meanwhile, IDC predicts global adoption of agentic AI will triple within two years, signalling near-term momentum.
The code explosion
Matos says the volume and pace of source code production is a critical consideration given projected AI adoption. Lines of code – a metric quantifying program size – reached 182 billion in 2025, produced by 36.5 million human engineers.
“This is projected to grow at 17% annually to reach 500 billion lines of code by 2030, just four years away," Matos says. "We physically do not have the human resources to upskill sufficiently.”
This talent shortage, combined with cost pressures, is accelerating AI uptake. Matos predicts 60% of the 500 billion lines of code will be created by GenAI.
“We use roughly about 15 000 lines of code a year. There's an associated cost per line – a metric in the public domain captured over an extended period. It can cost anything from $2 to $14 per line of code produced.”
Kevin Scott, CTO at Microsoft, has predicted that by 2030, 95% of software development code will be AI-generated or AI-augmented.
Skills crisis
The talent gap is acute. "Just in North America alone, there's a 1.2 million shortage of software engineers," Matos says.
Ageiro points to World Bank and Brookings Institution research indicating sub-Saharan Africa faces a documented and severe shortage of software development and advanced digital skills: demand is projected in the hundreds of millions of roles by 2030, yet fewer than one in eight graduates receive formal digital training, and most countries lack strong computer science foundations in schools.
Brookings estimates Africa had about 716 000 professional developers in 2021, marginally up from 690 000 in 2020 – growth far too slow relative to projected demand.
The World Bank and IFC estimate that over 230 million jobs in sub-Saharan Africa will require digital skills by 2030, including coding, software engineering, data, cloud, AI and cyber security. Shortages are most severe at intermediate and advanced levels – the domain of software developers and engineers, not basic digital users.
Ageiro emphasises that sub-Saharan Africa’s skills shortage is not primarily about basic digital literacy: it is about advanced software development capabilities. With fewer than 1 million professional developers on the continent and only 11% of graduates receiving formal digital training, a structural bottleneck threatens tech-driven growth.
Given the pressure on organisations to onboard AI and develop software at pace and scale to make it financially viable, Ageiro has fine-tuned its value proposition around democratising AI-driven B2B enterprise software development.
“Our purpose is to build out humanity’s last app,” says Matos. “That’s not just a powerful slogan. It’s about (leveraging) a complete autonomous AI software development life cycle platform that covers everything.”
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