SaaS is Dead – A fantasy or a reality

Last month one of the most talked about statement in social media is “SaaS is dead” by Satya Nadella. He said, as we progress with AI Agents, SaaS products which were solving problems of the world are going to finally fade away and new set of software components will rise. The new age software will be intelligent and can cater same set of processes which traditional software can do now, but in different ways.

During the last 2 decades, one thing that really stirred the industry is SAAS. Majority of these SaaS products are generally doing CRUD operations, which means you open these Apps, create some data, which does some business logic inside and finally give you a report or notifications. These applications have a fixed set of functions, each of which can be performed through their user interface.

Now what is changing? In this post, I will delve into the details on how modern day software would be and predict how the industry is going to be by the end of this. 

A Paradigm shift …

As Nadella was pointing to, in his short video, the software that we use today regularly are going to change. Now you might think what is wrong with it ?

Think deeply, what is wrong with the Software we live in today ?

Software as we know, are driven by User Interfaces. We were historically building user interfaces to do simple works. For example, think of a task management software, like Microsoft Planner, Zoho Projects, Asana etc.. What is its major function ? The function is all the same.

Here you create a set of Tasks, you assign individual tasks to respective team members. And finally, the team member will work upon these tasks and finally close the task.

Now if you think what this interface does, is very simple. You just do CRUD operation on your database. That means when you create a Task, a new row is created into the database. When you open the task again, the same row is getting fetched and finally when you close it, the row in database is getting updated.

Now if you look into each of these apps, does it look same ?

No. Even if you never visit these apps yourself, you can still say, the user interface must have been completely different.  Because you have already came across to different software user interfaces built by different vendors.

Now you might say, what’s wrong with them ?

Yes there is a subtle difference than the UI that we interact with now, than the one which we want to. Think when you first started working with software ? Did you face issues on the user interface? You are bound to.

Or else, if you want to show an user interface to your child or any children, does he start working on those automatically ? Naah… You need to give explicit instructions to click this link, then go to that link… etc.

This is what we haven’t achieved.

Even though we try to built user interface which is simple and we employ huge amount of money to get better UX (User Experience) but still we fail in some extent.

Now come to the same example, If you ask your child to interact with Amazon Alexa … Do you need to guide him?

No. He automatically can interact. It is the same as interacting with a person. When you ask Alexa to place order for you, what does it do ? It actually calls various functions; we call them APIs (Application Programming Interface) and finally place the order. If you would like to do the same thing through User Interface, think how much time you have to spend to do this simple task.  

Now that is the difference.

So what does the SAAS companies actually provide you? They are building functions. These functions are specific to your business or any need. You want to consume them to do some tasks and to do these, you want user interfaces.

This is going to change. The SaaS will eventually be transformed to AaaS (Agent as a Service) where we will be interacting with the agent to do these tasks themselves just like we interact with a real human being.

Survival of the fittest…

Just like how Charles Darwin identified about the world we live in, the same applies to the software industry as well.

As in past decade, software industry introduced cloud based software solutions. It was a stir to the world of software infusing large amount of SaaS applications being built for cloud. The platforms for public and private cloud came into being, and few of the software which took this chance to migrate to the latest version are the ones which survived.

Software companies are again going through a change, where the user interfaces are eventually phased out. Businesses are reluctant to spend money on UI / UX and invest more on actual problem solving. They will start moving from isolated SaaS application to connected systems, which can work intelligently. Data would play the critical part of modern world. The ones who correctly uses the data to give solution to the problem would be treated as the fittest.

The newer software will only have an agent interface, where you can instruct to do some work, and the agent will automatically call the APIs, store the response in a vector databases, aggregate other contextual data and finally respond with the final result. Here the API call, the use of Cache, the input parsing, security etc. everything handled by the Agent itself.  As an user you are just interacting just similar to how you interact with another person.

If we talk about some of the common tasks which happens behind the scenes, they are:

· Input / output validation Crutial for security ensuring both input and output conforms to expected format, types, lengths and ranges.

· Guardrails Preventive measures that enforces rules and constraints within the system for compliance and auditability.

·  Caching Frequently accessed data is stored in temporary storage to quicker RAG.

·   Hybrid Search Combining keyword based search as well as semantic search to ensure superior output.

·   Re-ranking Continuous improvement of output based on search result relevance.

·   Evals Evaluates the performance of the system to ensure the Agent can self – learn enforcing the use of RLHF (Reinforcement learning from human feedback)

The early adopters ….

Now that you know Agents are the software of future, how does the industry look at? 

Companies like Microsoft is coming up with CoPilot for everywhere. The CoPilot is a kind of multi – agent AI solution which works with different apps continuously, thereby enabling communication of data between them. Now if you ask CoPilot about any query related to your Office 365 account, it can check the files, your activities etc and finally reconstruct your response.   Similarly, Microsoft have already released Agent AI features inside Dynamics product line which can work with the business data and can produce actionable insights. Your CoPilot can seamlessly work as a Service Personnel to enhance the business Support, or even there is CoPilot for Sales who can work just like your sales guy. 

Another company which is almost an early adopter is SalesForce. Salesforce came up with AgentForce in its event Dreamforce to introduce the Agentic AI, an agent that can act just like a virtual human. You can enable your agent inside your Salesforce platform which acts as a master of your CRM, taking into account of all the information you feed in to the application. 

Not only these two, there are a large number of these applications coming up everyday which challenge each other to do more.

But how do you choose the solution that best suits your need ?

Your best bet …

Well, not all that glitters are gold. I think one of the best solutions which can exists are the ones who can connect all your business applications effectively and produce an unified Agent user interface. AaaS will exist and applications will have only one interface, which is an Agent system, that can proactively ask you right question to solve the problem, but imagine, if you want all your application to perform using the same user interface, in such a case, you need Agent of an iPaaS, which is well connected with all your business apps, and can fetch or update data over them.

You don’t just need a Copilot who can work on your Dynamics F&O to identify possible bottlenecks of your business or it cannot work individually by sitting on your CRM to improve your customer relationship, but you need an Agent that can sit on your own brand and can connect to all these business applications and work as an individual without you requiring to login to various other applications.

It is like you need a Jack of all Trades … 😊

What to look for …

There are no other platform than an iPaaS which can really connect all of the application APIs into a single hub. APPSeCONNECT being an integration platform is already exposed to various business application and can easily use the data and do seamless integration. Additionally, you can also make it much more secure, as you get a layer in between which allows you to restrict sensitive information to your agent.  

Whatever you like, you talk, you type or you do nothing, your Agent will work day and night, look into your problems, understand your behaviour and fix them. It will work just like your human counterpart.

World is changing. Embrace it.

Do you think Agentic AI can replace human roles in an organization?

Let me know your thoughts in comments.