In recent articles, I discussed the age of personal Software and The impact of LLM's in software development. Today I will revisit the topic of Software but from a different perspective.
Today we will take a look at what happens to Software as a Service (SaaS) in the agentic internet.
The value of SaaS
Some of the key value propositions for most SaaS products is good user interface and ease of use. That stems from the fact that humans are the key users and interact directly with the Software, so a good user experience is a huge selling point.
However, things are about to change.
The agentic internet
As we have been discussing for a long time, the world of Software and the internet is going to change completely with the advent of AI agents.
Systems and Software will be redesigned to accommodate agents rather than humans and, therefore, the things we used to look for on SaaS will no longer have the same value in the agentic economy.
Let's take the case of CRM (Client Relationship Management) systems.
Currently, this type of system acts as a information storage and planning tool where (human) agents can store information regarding their touchpoints with clients and also consume information from it to plan their next interactions.
That's why good CRM systems need to provide a good user experience. These human agents need to be able to easily input information into the system and also find, filter and export information from it.
However, when we replace human agents with autonomous ones powered by AI, UX suddenly isn't relevant anymore. AI agents are able to interact directly with the information in the system and process it without the need for an interface and thus, CRM becomes nothing more than a database.
It's very obvious that the current model of SaaS will no longer work and therefore these business will need to adapt. But how?
The Agent Software Ecosystem
According to Stephen Coyner the new software ecosystem will be formed by three layers:
Infrastructure: the data layer. Where information is stored and shared through an enterprise's systems
Intelligence: this is where the AI models lie and where agents get their cognitive capabilities from
Control: this is an interface for humans where they can interact with agents to delegate tasks, build applications, create processes and more
This new ecosystem will completely change the software market and existing businesses will need to do an honest assessment of their current products and decide where they want to be inserted in this new ecosystem.
The future is now
This is not mere speculation from a few players in the software industry. Many businesses are already trying to adapt to this new reality.
I work within the Salesforce ecosystem (although not directly for Salesforce) and I can tell that they were one of the business that saw it coming early on.
Salesforce has been pushing the AI narrative even before LLMs became widespread. I can't tell whether they will be leading the Agent reality or whether they will even survive it, but at the very least, they are well aware it's coming and are not trying to fight it.
Final thoughts
The agentic economy will completely disrupt Software as a Service. Most products that exist today will lose a lot of their appeal and, unless they are willing to adapt, will become nothing but glorified databases.
Businesses that accepted this new reality and are adapting their products and business models to be inserted in the new agent software ecosystem are more likely to survive this transformation.