Season 1, Episode 7 of "5 Minutes" – documenting SMOC's journey toward becoming a fully AI-driven company, and our goal of enabling any customer to launch their first AI sales agent in under 5 minutes. Follow the full series here: smoc.ai/blog/categories/5-minutes-series
Rebuilding a platform while the company runs on it is like changing an engine mid-flight. Every mistake hits customers directly. Over the last six months it got progressively faster – because AI fundamentally changed what we could do in parallel.
When I look back at what we actually achieved, one thing stands out: the improvement isn't additive. It's multiplicative.
We got 10x in product development speed. We can now ship new features – often generated with AI – in minutes, with quality assurance built in from the start. That's what made the 5-minute goal realistic in the first place.
And we got 10x lower cost:
Two years ago:
- Cloud costs: NOK 40,000 (~€3,600) per month
- Infrastructure management: ~1.5 FTE
Today:
- Cloud costs: NOK 3,000 (~€270) per month
- Infrastructure management: ~0.2 FTE
A platform that is 10x better on scalability and performance – at more than 10x lower cost.
10x speed × 10x lower cost = 100x impact.
That's not an exaggeration. It's the math behind what happens when you build correctly with AI as a co-worker – not just faster, but fundamentally cheaper and better. As someone who started out as a senior engineer, these numbers are almost hard to believe. But they're real.
And they're exactly what makes the 5-minute promise possible.
Follow the full series here: smoc.ai/blog/categories/5-minutes-series
