What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?
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What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?
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Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?
#2Great doc. I wonder when we’ll be getting an OS that dedicates itself to Agents.
Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?
#3We need a simple open-source protocol which includes authentication and ability for agents to make payments. Essentially what you want is the ability for an agent to take a core action (as the article mentions, like adding a record to a CRM).
I fundamentally believe that human-oriented web apps are not the answer, and neither is REST. We need something purpose-built.
The challenge is, it has to be SIMPLE enough for people to easily implement in one day. And it needs to be open source to avoid the obvious problems with it being a for-profit enterprise.
Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?
#4So is "AI Agents" something the community has settled on or is this a Google-ism? I remember people arguing about this some time ago with no definitive answer.
Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?
#5SaaS will become the wordpress plugin equivalent for Agent platforms.
Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?
#6I 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 realized that ~90% of the reports were deeply wrong.
Why were they wrong? It had nothing to do with the LLMs per se, 03-mini doesn’t do much better on our suite than gpt 3.5. The problem was that knowing which data to use for which query was deeply contextual.
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.
I still work on AI powered products and I don’t see even a little line of sight on this problem. Everyone’s data is immensely messy and likely to remain so. AI has introduced a number of tools to manage that mess, but so far it appears they’ll need to be exposed via fairly traditional UIs.
Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?
#7We need a simple open-source protocol which includes authentication and ability for agents to make payments. Essentially what you want is the ability for an agent to take a core action (as the article mentions, like adding a record to a CRM). I fundamentally believe that human-oriented web apps are not the answer, and neither is REST. We need something purpose-built. The challenge is, it has to be SIMPLE enough for p…
This is the same dumb problem as always. Are you who you say you are and are you allowed to do such and such action?
There’s existing solutions but everything is its own special snowflake. Oauth is a lie, sso sometimes works. But sso doesn’t provide a differentiation between my employee and their broken script.
Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?
#8I learned about the idea of Generative UI from a Sharp Talk podcast, and it's stuck with me ever since.
Many SaaS (especially the complex ones, which are the also the most important ones) have a tonne of UI often imposing a huge amount of non-work work onto users - all the clicking you have to do as part of entering or retrieving data, especially if the UI flow doesn't fit exactly what you're trying to do at that moment. An example might be quicly creating an epic and a bunch of related tickets in Jira, and having them all share some common components.
A generative UI would be able to construct a custom UI for the particular thing the user is trying to do at any point in time. I think it's a really powerful idea, and it could probably be done today by smartly using eg Jira's APIs.
The ability to span applications would be even more powerful. Done well it might even kill the need to maintain complex integrations between related Saas (eg how some product development application might need to sync data to/from Jira or ADO) by having the AI just keep track of changes and move them from one system to another.
Once it gets to the point where the Gen UI is go-to system for interactions you have to wonder what all the designers and UI builders at the myriad SaaS will be doing...
Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?
#9I 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…
Did the execs immediately recognize that the reports were wrong, or did some analyst working in a cubicle on the 9th floor point that out?
Re: What happens to SaaS in a world with computer-using agents?
#10SaaS will become the wordpress plugin equivalent for Agent platforms.
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