SaaS Is NOT Dead But Its Getting A New Workspace allinpodcast saas ai future podcastseries

Here's where I think the greatest threat is to the SaaS companies. It's not, in my view, their existence. I don't think it's existential. It's where the future value capture is going to be. So let me give you an example. All these SaaS products are rolling out like AI co-pilots inside their tools. And some of them work pretty well, but they're limited to playing in that sandbox. Whereas you look at something like Cloud Co-Work right now, it has connectors to all these different SaaS tools. It can pull in data across all these different tools, and it works seamlessly across databases and tools. And that's a pretty attractive place to be, right? Like, you know, which one of these products is going to be your workspace? Seems to me that you're going to want your workspace to be the one that spans across and gives you AI across the most data and context, as opposed to having a bunch of separate AIs inside of your existing tools. So I think the risk for the SaaS companies, it's not that they get replaced, although that'll happen to some degree, but it's that they become an old layer of the stack that now there's a new layer that gets built on top of. It becomes more legacy infrastructure. And all the action kind of moves to a new layer of the stack, and that's where the value add happens. And if that happens, it kind of cuts into their future opportunity, right? Because a lot of these companies were banking on AI as their next, you know, you look at their product roadmaps, right? It's all AI related. So that to me, I think is the big risk, is that the value capture for the next layer of the stack happens somewhere else. Yeah, I'm experiencing this in startup land where people go to the action, as you called it, SACs. The most productive thing you can do is create an open CLAW, which used to be called CLAWed Bot, not by Anthropic. This is the open source project I talked about last week. And we've actually now created like three or four of these agent SACs. We've bought the Mac studios, and we're now running Kimmy on some of them. And we had to open up SAS accounts for these four agents. So actually our SAS spend went up in the short to midterm because we opened up four more Slack, you know, enterprise versions, four more Notion, four more Google Docs. So it's almost like we added four employees. However, we now have put about 20 or 30% of the work people were doing into these agents. And I think it's going to be sustainable that every month we move 10 to 20% of work being done by humans into agents. But we will never use the ones that are built into the tools. To your point, SACs, using Notion's AI tool, it's nice. Using Slack's, it's also very nice. And Google's got Gemini everywhere on the top right hand corner. But when you make agents with open CLAW, and you have them saying, hey, pull this data from my calendar, send an email to this person, include in that some Notion documents, it's unbelievable how powerful it is. So, and that I think is going to be owned by open source. That means the next generation of companies, they may never open up these accounts. They may use more bespoke software, and it may, all technology is deflationary, we know that. So your SAS spend might go from 10% of an employee's salary down to 5%, down to 1%. That's what I think the trend will be, which means these companies are going to need to really downsize their expense base in order to keep those earnings up, and they're going to have to evolve their products massively. The products are just going to have to provide more value and more hooks. Freeberg, you have any thoughts on this? Go ahead, Seth. I just want to respond to one thing. So I think one of the real conundrums for SAS companies is whether they're going to be open data or closed data. I think Bill Gurley has sort of coined this term. So it's not open source or closed sources anymore, it's open data or closed data. You can see why they'd want to be closed data, right? Especially if you're a large suite like Salesforce, you can lay claim to being that workspace for AI. You've got enough of the tools, you've got enough of a suite. You want to provide that, you want to capture that AI value layer. Yes.