by twieberneit | Jan 7, 2025 | Blog |
SaaS is dead! It will be replaced by agentic systems that replace coded business logic by AI agents that autonomously interact to bring said business logic to life, just smarter. Satya Nadella said it – or at least something in these lines, if I believe all the pundits around. His words lit up the Internet. And Satya Nadella being the CEO of a 3 trillion dollar company is the ultimate fount of truth and wisdom, when it comes to business applications. Is he not? So, what should we take from his statements? After all, the words of the CEO of one of the top 3 valuable companies on this Earth carry some weight. Let me start straight. I call BS! SaaS, first of all, is a delivery model of logic that also had some implications on vendors‘ business models and their approaches to pricing. For a variety of good and not so good reasons this delivery model succeeded vs. the prevalent model of on-premises software. Some of the more important reasons have been “no lock in by vendors”, “only pay for what you use”, “reduction of own infrastructure cost”. Of course, there are more. All of them being true – or not so much. One thing is for sure, SaaS led to a considerable centralization of compute resources. Hyperscalers emerged. Vendors took over the management of the application stack for their clients. It is very hard to envision that this gets reverted any time soon, even in a world with increasing trust issues and a good argument for edge computing. What SaaS is not, or only marginally, is a way...
by twieberneit | Sep 19, 2024 | Blog |
Oracle Cloud World is in the books, Dreamforce just wrapped up, Hubspot’s Inbound event is still on, and there is one key theme that overarches all three events. And no, it is not Larry Ellison getting all cozy with AWS (or Azure, for that matter). It is also not that his keynote was distinctly geeky, after some years of Oracle putting business solutions to the front. Or that Mark Benioff apparently tore up his keynote in the last moment. It is also not that Hubspot CEO Yamini Rangan found that the sales process is broken and that customers know more about you as you about your customer. No, the theme is … drumroll … you will have guessed it … AI agents. Oracle’s Steve Miranda talked about them at length in a line of business context, while Larry focused on IT, security, and database-oriented agents. For Salesforce, agents are even more of a topic, dubbing Dreamforce the biggest AI event and Salesforce the most successful AI CRM – both technically right but probably somewhat short selling the full value of both. For Salesforce, the next big thing is Agentforce, it’s AI Agent platform. And Hubspot announced Breeze, its AI to power the customer platform, which, you guess it, includes agents. CEO Yamani Rangan talked about marketing, sales, and service agents. Co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah then spent considerable time in his keynote, talking about agent.ai, Hubspots “professional network for AI agents”. What struck me watching all three keynotes – Ellison’s, Benioff’s and Shah’s – is the change from last year’s messaging to this year’s messaging. Last years it was...
by twieberneit | Sep 16, 2024 | Analysis, Blog |
The news Dreamforce 2024 has (almost) started and the announcements are pouring in. Unsurprisingly, many of them are about AI, generative AI, Slack, and of course, agents. One of the major announcements that Salesforce made these days is about the release of Agentforce. According to Salesforce, Agentforce is ”a groundbreaking suite of autonomous AI agents that augment employees and handle tasks in service, sales, marketing, and commerce, driving unprecedented efficiency and customer satisfaction. Agentforce enables companies to scale their workforces on demand with a few clicks. Agentforce’s limitless digital workforce of AI agents can analyze data, make decisions, and take action on tasks like answering customer service inquiries, qualifying sales leads, and optimizing marketing campaigns. With Agentforce, any organization can easily build, customize, and deploy their own agents for any use case across any industry. The future of AI is agents, and it’s here.” The platform is intended to bring chatbots to the next level by graduating them from co-pilots that “rely on human requests” to autonomously operating agents that retrieve the right data on demand, build action plans and execute these plans without intervention. The bigger picture According to Salesforce’s Trends in AI for CRM report, a staggering amount of 41 per cent of employee time is spent on low impact work. On top of this, 65 per cent of desk workers believe that generative AI will allow them to be more strategic. Salesforce also maintains that “every company has more jobs to be done than the resource available to do them.” Zendesk postulates that the number of interactions in customer service will grow by a factor of...
