The Evolution Of Platform Teams In An AI First World

For the last decade, platform teams have been the unsung heroes of engineering organizations.

Their mandate was simple: build the internal plumbing that enables product and business teams to move fast. From DevOps to QA environments, data infrastructure to internal tools, authentication systems to localization services—platform teams built and maintained the foundational services that everyone else depended on.

Most companies followed a similar pattern. Platform teams made up ~20% of total engineering headcount. So if you had 200 engineers, about 40 were focused on internal platforms. And for a long time, this made sense.

But the world has changed.

Part I: The Decline of Traditional Platform Teams

Over the last few years, the maturity of infrastructure tooling has increased dramatically. You no longer need to build everything yourself.

DevOps has been transformed by Kubernetes, Terraform, and fully managed CI/CD pipelines. QA environments can be spun up and torn down in seconds. Data infrastructure is no longer a bespoke stack of 10 tools—it’s available out of the box through platforms like 5X.

The need to build and maintain core platform services internally has shrunk. What used to require large teams now requires far fewer people—and in some cases, none at all.

This isn’t to say platform teams were a bad idea. Far from it. They helped companies scale in the early cloud era. But as infra has become more commoditized, the value of traditional platform engineering has started to decay.

Which begs the question: what happens to platform teams now?