Last week I attended a conference with my wife that had absolutely nothing to do with marketing technology.

She is finishing her degree to become a teacher in the fine arts, and her research focuses on a topic that has been quietly worrying educators for years: school dropout rates and the role creativity can play in preventing them.

The numbers in the Netherlands are confronting. Roughly 20% of school-age children are considered neurodiverse in some form. Around 70,000 children are currently not attending school, and another 280,000 are at risk of dropping out.

Not because they lack intelligence

Every few weeks, another post appears in my feed declaring that SaaS is finished.

Someone cancelled a subscription, vibe-coded a replacement in an afternoon, and now the economics of software are apparently solved. Why pay €30, €300, or €3,000 a month for a tool when an AI can generate the same thing with a prompt?

The story has become loud enough that it has started leaking into financial markets. Investors are suddenly trying to understand what AI-assisted software creation might do to companies like HubSpot, Adobe, and Salesforce. If every