Agents as a Service
The end of SaaS as we know it?
I’ve seen recent comments online regarding the decline of SaaS (Software as a Service), and the rise of AI Agents to take its place.
While this may ultimately happen, I believe that the SaaS business model will still be with us for some time. I do agree that 2025 will be the year that AI Agents become a regular part of the AI conversation.
What does the mean to the regular person? In reality not too much - at least in the near term. I’ve built a variety of SaaS businesses over the last 30 years. In the late 90’s, this new delivery method was just emerging, and companies were hesitant to move from their on-premise systems to “the cloud”.
Fast-forward to today, and cloud computing is taken for granted. In many cases, companies now prefer this method of delivery, and its associated subscription model. Companies understand the value equation provided by SaaS, along with the risks.
Today, we are in the same place as SaaS was all those years ago. AI is the new kid on the block, and is still proving itself. There continue to be many questions around how to manage this new technology and integrate it into a business.
Most companies of any scale have been exploring generative AI for the past couple of years - testing the waters to better understand how it might be of value.
The biggest hurdle to adoption is data privacy. Companies have significant uncertainty and fear around how prompting data is actually being used to train new models.
To address this, at least in the near term, we are seeing some AI processing move from cloud providers, back behind the 4 walls of a business. This, of course, requires a investment to implement and maintain, but may allay the concerns of the security teams.
Agent technology will continue to evolve to the point where is it is both trusted and accepted - just as cloud computing is today.
And once it is, I think we will all have our own personal AI agents acting on our behalf - some focused on work, and others on leisure. It would be great if I could send my agent some vacation places that I’m interested in traveling to, or perhaps a conference that I’d like to attend.
My agent would interact with other agents to facilitate my airline and hotel reservations, rental cars, excursions, etc. The business rules around all of this will dictate things like budget, which companies to prioritize, etc.
This will free me up to focus on more value-add activities. Imagine the possibilities!