What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents? • Hacker News Board

Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?

#81

Post by mooreds » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 2:55 PM UTC

Magmalgebra wrote: post #6

I think this post underestimates how the degree to which “what data is correct” is deeply contextual. My team created an identical hypothesis to this doc ~2 years ago and generated a proof of concept. It was pretty magic, we had fortune 500 execs asking for reports on internal metrics and they’d generate in a couple of minutes. First week we got rave reviews - followed by an immediate round of negative feedback as we…

> Digging into use cases you’d fine that for a particular question you needed to not just get all the rows from a column, you needed to do some obscure JOIN ON operation. This fact was only known by 2 data scientists in charge of writing the report. This flavor or problem - data being messy, with the messiness only documented in a few people’s brains, repeated over and over.

This reminds me of one of the key plot points in "The Sparrow" by Mary Doria Russell. Small spoiler ahead so if you haven't read it and want to be surprised, stop reading.

...

Basically, one of the characters works as an AI implementer, replacing humans in their jobs by learning deeply about how they do their work and coding up an AI replacement. She run across a SETI researcher and works on replacing him, but he has a human intuition when matching signals that she would never have discovered because it was so random.

Great book if you haven't read it.

Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?

#82

Post by heroprotagonist » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 4:52 PM UTC

caspper69 wrote: post #25

svilen_dobrev wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42974429 from few days ago.. the OP was re-advertising OAUth, but another idea might be, that new kind of interfaces are needed - application agentic interfaces - standing in middle between APP(Programming) (too detailed) and AHI(Human) screen/forms (too human targeted). IMO.

I propose the Open Agent Interface. We can call it OpenAI. I'll see myself out.

*Open as in, many people can pay to use it. Not ALL, that would be ridiculous. And certainly not forever. Once it starts to work correctly, no more buzz will be needed to drive investment and you'll then be slowly cut off or price starved out of most functionality.

Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?

#83

Post by burnte » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 7:04 PM UTC

satvikpendem wrote: post #73

burnte wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this post underestimates how the degree to which “what data is correct” is deeply contextual. I can't get anyone to listen to this point. I'm seeing plans going full steam ahead deploying AI when they don't even have a good definition of the PROBLEM much less how to train the AI to do things well and correctly. I was in a 90 minute meeting with some execs who were all high on ChatGPT Operators. He was sayin…

> I can't get anyone to listen to this point. I'm seeing plans going full steam ahead deploying AI when they don't even have a good definition of the PROBLEM much less how to train the AI to do things well and correctly. First time? I did AI work years before the current generative AI boom and it was the same then too, managers wanted to stick AI into everything without even knowing what the hell they actually wanted…

First time with AI, yeah, but I am not surprised since I've seen it with every other tech fad. People come up with solutions to implement, not problems to solve.

Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?

#84

Post by burnte » Tue, Feb 11, 2025, 7:05 PM UTC

OccamsMirror wrote: post #60

burnte wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think this post underestimates how the degree to which “what data is correct” is deeply contextual. I can't get anyone to listen to this point. I'm seeing plans going full steam ahead deploying AI when they don't even have a good definition of the PROBLEM much less how to train the AI to do things well and correctly. I was in a 90 minute meeting with some execs who were all high on ChatGPT Operators. He was sayin…

Executives are salivating at the opportunity to cut 80 staff with no repercussions. They're so eager they're keeping the blinkers on. The fact that the AI has no clothing is ignored because the promise is so attractive.

Yep. He said any company that isn't all-in on AI will be out of business next year. I really want to see ChatGPT Operators fix my roof.

Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?

#85

Post by TranquilMarmot » Wed, Feb 12, 2025, 4:51 PM UTC

randomcatuser wrote: post #57

TranquilMarmot wrote: post #49

We're working on Agents over at Zapier, https://zapier.com/agents You can have Agents run behaviors async by attaching triggers to them, for example when you get a specific email or something gets updated in a CRM. You can also give the agent access to basically any third-party action you can think of. Like others in this thread have pointed out, there's a nice middle-ground here between an LLM-only interface and som…

Nice! I'm kinda curious -- what do you see as Zapier's advantage when it comes to building agents? It seems like everyone is doing something similar? (e.g Lindy, Gumloop) Agents have a pre-iPhone feel to them (when everyone was making phones with keyboards). What do you think the ultimate Agents looks like?

As the other commenter pointed out, Zapier already has 7k+ apps that can be connected to. Zapier has already figured out the "hard parts" connecting to other apps, which are things like authentication, getting APIs to return standardized schemas, and most importantly business relationships with other companies so that if things need changing, we can reach out. We also have tested and proven infrastructure that can handle massive scale.

I definitely agree that agents are very early days - as for the "ultimate agent" it feels like everything is moving towards them being a sort of co-worker, if that makes sense. I think handling human-in-the-loop scenarios nicely is going to be vital to an agent actually being useful. i.e. you clock in in the morning and check out all the stuff your agent did overnight and can approve/change/reject tasks. There's a ton of healthy competition in the space, so in a year or two we'll all have a much better idea of where the tech is going.