(2024-05-21) Procopio OpenAI Is Building 'Her' And Big Tech Is Still Defending SaaS Canned Reports

Joe Procopio: OpenAI Is Building 'Her' and Big Tech Is Still Defending SaaS Canned Reports. I don’t have any great love for this current version of genAI.

I was one of the inventors of the Automated Insights platform, the first commercially available genAI engine, all the way back in 2010

However, I also believe that the motive behind the tech also remains the same as it was when we started selling genAI over a decade ago. And talking about that motive is where I keep getting into trouble.

I got dragged when I said that this wave of AI was potentially going to end the current, and now dated, flavor of SaaS. This is why corporations and investors are all throwing money at anything with “artificial” or “intelligence” stamped on it. Certain people who should know better screamed at me: “You don’t even know what SaaS is!”

The AI versus SaaS battle is going exactly where I said it was going to go, and here’s where it’s going next

I said users don’t want another screen.

SaaS happened because users didn’t want to install and maintain software

But the evolution of SaaS didn’t stop there.

When the mobile-first movement happened, users again decided they could live without screen real estate, and ease of textual input, and they would even take another hit to functionality and processing speed if it meant being able to work in a mobile UI.

My conclusion: The reason the current players are all panic-investing in genAI is because it represents not just another shift in UI, but the potential to completely change the interpretation of input and output in that it purports to eliminate screens altogether.

Once users decide they’re willing to live without those screens, genAI exposes SaaS as just a clunky middleman between you and your data:

You know what happens to middlemen during innovation cycles?

What SaaS Really Is

It isn’t about machines doing the work. It’s about machines interpreting the data required to do the work

When I talk about genAI versus SaaS, I’m not just talking about where the processing happens. I’m not talking about how you pay for it. I’m talking about what control over the input and output means to the question of who controls the software.

Screens are about input and output. No one ever controlled the keyboard. No one ever controlled the graphical display. OpenAI and Google? They aim to control both input and output. Call it the “interpretation layer.”