You have a product, which sits between your users and what your users want. That product has an UI for users to operate. Many (most, I imagine) users would prefer to hire an assistant to operate that UI for them, since UI is not the actual value your service provides. Now, s/assistant/AI agent/ and you can see that your product turns into a tool call.
So the simpler problem is that your product now becomes merely a tool call for AI agents. That's what users want. Many SaaS companies won't like that, because it removes their advertising channel and commoditizes their product.
It's the same reason why API access to SaaS is usually restricted or not available for the users except biggest customers. LLMs defeat that by turning the entire human experience into an API, without explicit coding.
> So the simpler problem is that your product now becomes merely a tool call for AI agents. That's what users want.
This is a big assumption, and not one I've seen in product testing. Open-ended human language is not a good interface for highly detailed technical work, at least not with the current state of LLMs.
> It's the same reason why API access to SaaS is usually restricted or not available for the users except biggest customers.
I don't... think this is true? Of the top of my head, aside from cloud providers like AWS/GCP/Azure which obviously provide APIs: Salesforce, Hubspot, Jira all provide APIs either alongside basic plans or as a small upsell. Certainly not just for the biggest customers. You're probably thinking of social media where Twitter/Reddit/FB/etc don't really give API access, but those aren't really B2B SaaS products.
> A good ui will improve on assistant in every way.
True.
"Good" UI seems to be in short supply these days, even from trillion dollar corporations.
But even with that, it is still not "ridiculous" for many to prefer to "hire an assistant to operate that UI for them". A lot of the complexity in UI is the balance between keeping common tasks highly visible without hiding the occasional-use stuff, allowing users to explore and learn more about what can be done without overwhelming them.
If I want a spaceship in Blender and don't care which one you get — right now the spaceship models that any GenAI would give you are "pick your poison" between Diffusion models' weirdness and the 3D equivalent of the pelican-on-a-bike weirdness — the easiest UI is to say (or type) "give me a spaceship", not doing all the steps by hand.
If you have some unformatted time series data and want to use it to forecast the next quarter, you could manually enter it into a spreadsheet, or you could say/type "here's a JPG of some time series data, use it to forecast the next quarter".
Again, just to be clear, I agree with everyone saying current AI is only mediocre in performance, it does make mistakes and shouldn't be relied upon yet. But the error rates are going down, the task horizons they don't suck at are going up. I expect the money to run out before they get good enough to take on all SaaS, but at the same time they're already good enough to be interesting.
You have a product, which sits between your users and what your users want. That product has an UI for users to operate. Many (most, I imagine) users would prefer to hire an assistant to operate that UI for them, since UI is not the actual value your service provides. Now, s/assistant/AI agent/ and you can see that your product turns into a tool call.
So the simpler problem is that your product now becomes merely a tool call for AI agents. That's what users want. Many SaaS companies won't like that, because it removes their advertising channel and commoditizes their product.
It's the same reason why API access to SaaS is usually restricted or not available for the users except biggest customers. LLMs defeat that by turning the entire human experience into an API, without explicit coding.