The ghost in the machine: AI in software ecosystems

Paper in proceeding, 2026

Although software ecosystems have been around for decades, the emergence of generative AI (GenAI) and Agentic AI is significantly changing the nature of software ecosystems. AI allows for individuals and organizations to replace human actors with AI agents that act on behalf of humans or organizations, but without human involvement. This leads to fundamental shifts in how ecosystems function and evolve. In this paper, we explore the trend of moving towards GenAI and Agentic AI in software ecosystems, the implications this will have in practice and we hypothesize on how this will likely evolve in a context where some agents in the ecosystem are human and others are AI driven. As the basis for our discussion, we provide examples from multiple companies in the software-intensive domain that are all exploring the potential of AI in software ecosystems. The key contribution of the paper is a conceptual model in which we outline the steps we believe companies will move through when evolving towards AI-driven ecosystems.