I'm reading this thread's comments and a LOT of you are missing OP's point. OP is not describing the risk that your SaaS product is now easily cloned by your customers' internal devs (or startup competitors) armed with agents. The risk is that certain SaaS products (but not all) mostly exist to provide answers to end users' questions about data, answers that can now be obtained by providing the same raw data to an agent with a prompt.
AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
201–210 of 398 posts
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#202Earlier quoted context omitted.
The technology of LLMs is already applicable to valuable enough problems, therefore it won’t be a bubble. The world might be using a standard of AI needing to be a world beater to succeed but it’s simply not the case, AI a is software, and it can solve problems other software can’t.
> The technology of LLMs is already applicable to valuable enough problems, therefore it won’t be a bubble. Dot-com was a bubble despite being applicable to valuable problems. So were railways when the US had a bubble on those. Bubbles don't just mean tulips. What we've got right now, I'm saying the money will run out and not all the current players will win any money from all their spending. It's even possible that…
Ai is much more developed at its entrance to the economy than most anything during the dot com boom.
Dot com is not super comparable to AI.
Dot com had very few users on the internet compared to today.
Dot com did not have ubiquitous e-commerce. The small group of users didn’t spend online.
Search engines didn’t have the amount of information online that there is today.
Dot com did not have usable high speed mobile data, or broadband available for the masses.
Dot com did not have social media to share and alas how things can work as quickly.
LLMs were largely applicable to industry when gpt 4 came out. We didn’t have the new terms of reference for non deterministic software.
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#203I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…
A year or two from now it will be trivial to copy your product
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#204I'm seeing the opposite. AI is actually increasing the demand for what would previously be too expensive, bespoke integrations and solutions. Those are now becoming more feasible and doable. There is also the notion that a lot of companies are actually very behind on embracing software or SAAS. Especially in manufacturing it's common to see operations that haven't materially changed anything in decades. The fallacy h…
> Especially in manufacturing it's common to see operations that haven't materially changed anything in decades. > Especially when things are mission critical, you kind of want to know stuff works properly and that there's no million $ mistakes lurking anywhere. This is what I'm wondering about; things don't change because the company doesn't like change, and the risks of change are very real. So changes either have…
I don't think that's entirely correct. You can do TDD style development with AI and it leads to better results.
It's just that messing with a company's core manufacturing is something they don't do lightly. They work with multiple shifts of staff that are supposed to work in these environments. People generally don't have a lot of computer skills, so things need to be simple, repeatable, and easy to explain. Any issues with production means cost increases, delays happen, and money is lost.
That being said, these companies are always looking for better ways to do stuff, to eliminate work that is not needed, etc. That's your way in. If there's a demonstrable ROI, most companies get a lot less risk averse.
That used to involve bespoke software integrations. Those are developed at great cost and with some non trivial risk by expensive software agencies. Some of these projects fail and failure is expensive. AI potentially reduces cost and risk here. E.g. a generic SAP integration isn't rocket science to vibe code. We're talking well documented and widely used APIs here. You'd want some oversight and testing here obviously. But it's the type of low level plumbing that traditionally gets outsourced to low wages countries. Using AI here is probably already happening at a large scale.
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#205Earlier quoted context omitted.
SaaS products rely on resisting commoditization. AI agents defeat that.
Yes, except for the fact that any non-trivial saas does non-trivial stuff that an agent will be able to call (as the 'secretary') while the user still has to pay the subscription to use.
I don't think history opines favorably on companies that lose the last-mile connection with their customers.
For purposes of this thread, if chat AI becomes the primary business interface, then every service behind that becomes much easier to replace.
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#206I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…
A year or two from now it will be trivial to copy your product
And? How easy will it be to iterate the product and build features and a user experience as it is used in the wild? How easy will it be to find customers willing to pay you money for it?
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#207I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…
That may well be an exception though. I'd imagine most SaaS builders are very much figuring things out as they go rather than starting with deep domain expertise
Additional hot take: deep domain expertise is only value-add while actively adding new features
There's a huge subset of SaaS that's feature-frozen and being milked for ARR.
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#208Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am speaking from experience. We have a SaaS tool for example to to CI/CD. It's super expensive, has a number of questionable design choices. It's full of features, half of which either do not work, or do not work as expected, or need some arcane domain knowledge to get them working. These features provide 'user-friendly' abstractions over raw stuff, like authing with various repos, downloading and publishing packag…
That's my point, "It's full of features". You said it yourself. You have bought a shallow but wide SaaS product, one with tons of features that don't get much development or testing individually. You're then trying to use it like a deep but narrow product and complaining that your complex use case doesn't fit their OK-ish feature. MS do this in a lot of their products, which is why Slack is much better than Teams, bu…
I'm arguing this is an entirely flawed product category (which might have elements of fraud as well) - things that are easy to get started with, but as your skill level or the requirements complexity increases, you start to see the limitations, and get entangled in the 'ecosystem', so given a sufficiently knowledgeable workforce, you are at a net negative by year 2 or 3 compared to experts having built something bespoke, or going the open-source route.
I'm sure you have encountered the pattern where you write A that calls B that uses C as the underlying platform. You need something in A, and know C can do it, but you have to figure out how you can achieve it through B. For a highly skilled individual(or one armed with AI) , B might have a very different value proposition than one who has to learn stuff from scratch.
Js packages are perfect illustration of these issues - there are tons of browser APIs that are wrapped by easy-to-use 'wrapper' packages, that have unforeseen consequences down the road.
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#209I'm CTO at a vertical SaaS company, paired with a product-focused CEO with deep domain expertise. The thesis doesn't match my experience. For one thing, the threat model assumes customers can build their own tools. Our end users can't. Their current "system" is Excel. The big enterprises that employ them have thousands of devs, but two of them explicitly cloned our product and tried to poach their own users onto it.…
The beauty of HN: frequently comments are way more valuable than the article being shared
Re: AI agents are starting to eat SaaS
#210Earlier quoted context omitted.
A year or two from now it will be trivial to copy your product
And? How easy will it be to iterate the product and build features and a user experience as it is used in the wild? How easy will it be to find customers willing to pay you money for it?
Doesn’t have to be a commercial solution to change the game. There’s a lot of room between the commercial product and ‘Our end users… current "system" is Excel.’ Especially if the market moves towards making useful APIs at the ERP and vendors endpoints.