(2023-09-05) Procopio The End Of Saas Is Closer Than You Think

Joe Procopio: The End of SaaS Is Closer Than You Think. As more and more companies hop on the A.I. train in what seems like a panicked game of musical chairs... it just might be actual panic driving the decisions in those executive boardrooms right now.

A.I. has been scaring the job prospects out of blue-collar and white-collar workers alike for decades now.

So why now?

Maybe it’s the end of SaaS.

there were also companies that fully missed the boat on mobile...this didn’t have to do with the size of the screen or the form factor of the device. Well, it did, but it was mostly about user interface, and primarily, user input.

That’s what I believe is driving the panic in the adoption of generative A.I. It’s not the thickness of the client or the size of the screen, it’s that those concepts are on the way out altogether.

Users Don’t Want Another Screen

It’s telling that the push is for “fewer screens” and not “fewer apps.”

Any software screen generator will tell you that the usefulness of the output of their software is directly related to the level of detail they can collect from the user. It’s no secret that as the shift to mobile-first became more prevalent, text input continued to be replaced by taps, choices, and sliders. Even voice.

Sure, no one likes a mobile keyboard. But the truth is, no one likes input.

A few weeks ago I had coffee with a friend who wanted to show me his app. His idea is solid, exciting, even

Then he showed me the app, and I figuratively threw up all over it.

To his credit, the app took in a lot of input from the user in a very simple touch/tap/slide way. Then the app took that data and everyone else’s data and aggregated it and crunched it all and returned… way too much data back.

What he had produced was the equivalent of a business intelligence system that didn’t solve the problem, but rearranged the data so that the problem had more context and could be easily(?) solved by humans. This is what BI systems do.

So then I asked him the first thing that popped into my head, “Can you get all those beautifully animated charts and graphs down to a single sentence recommendation?” Which, no coincidence, is exactly what Generative A.I. does.

The next generation of business and personal applications won’t need to spit screens of data back to the user. Or any kind of feedback. They’ll just do what you ask them to do.

The next level of A.I. makes decisions for you, based on what it has learned about what you would have done. That’s the intriguing (and admittedly scary) part of A.I. And it might just mean the end of software as we know it today.