If you need to solve gnarly industrial scale mixed integer combinatorial optimisation problems in the guts of your ML / optimisation engine, the commercial MIP solvers (gurobi , CPLEX ) or non-MIP based alternative combinatorial optimisation systems (localsolver ) can often give more optimal results in exponentially less running time than free open source alternatives.
1% more optimal solutions might translate into 1% more net profit for the entire org if you've gone whole hog and are trying to systematically profit optimise the entire business, so depending on the scale of the org it might be an easy business case to invest a few million dollars to set this system in place.
Annual server licenses for this commerical MIP solver software was 0(100k) / yr per server & the companies that build these products bake a lot of clever tricks from academia into these products that you can exploit by paying the license fee. ( my knowledge of pricing is out of date by about 7 years ) .
They deliver now often with backend cloud storage, update near continuously, integrate frequently with outside services, sometimes open source major components iteratively, typically have an evolving API and developer ecosystem to educate, and are sold as subscriptions. It’s not as “human in the loop” as some of the AI described in this article but it’s clearly moving toward services in terms of margins.
Nothing is like the old shrink wrapped software business, basically.
To me, the services you describe are software-as-a-service - they scale well without adding more humans to the mix. Services businesses, in contrast, generally need more humans to do more work.
I do think you are right that we are entering an age where the margin pressures will continue to increase. As the Amazon quote goes "your margin is my opportunity." In that world, strength accrues to the largest players - which is why AWS is so strong.
I like to joke that AWS should refund money to the startup that buy booths at re:Invent only to find out AWS is rolling out a competing service (with the acknowledgement that AWS entering a space doesn't necessarily mean the end of the competing company.)