Satya Nadella: Agent as A Service will replace SaaS [video]
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"Multi Repo Crud"
"the backend will be replaced by AI"
"Copilot in excel can generate all of excel, because it has a code interpreter and can generate anything"
"The notion that business applications exist, will all collapse"
It just sounds like a drug induced manic episode, talking about how reality doesn't exist and is an illusion.
The vision is that because you maybe have these super smart agents, they can sort of intuit queries and ui’s on the fly. You asked me for sales data last quarter from the billing system indexed on the number of outgoing calls in the sales database? I can pull that data for you ad-hoc, then show it to you in an intuitive way, and you don’t need to buy a piece of software for business analysts with hand coded integrations for your oracle database and the sales force API and all the other data sources in your giant enterprise/government whatever.
But this feels a bit too free form to me. People like ordering off the menu, they like curated experiences. They like shared panes of glass. Even if we move in this general direction, I think you can imagine people then building a SAAS on top of it.
I talked to someone who thought it was really interesting that Satya was selling a future that was antagonistic to Microsoft’s core business model. Not saying it’s not a fever dream, but not something you see a lot of CEO’s of fortune 500’s do either.
The thing about AI being on the backend is just the same old dream of programmers to avoid having to program, rather than reality. Which couples with the dream of business people dreaming that they can automate all of their work to avoid working! Salespeople are thinking "Maybe AI can make my sales calls" investors are thinking "maybe AI can analyze my investments", etc...
Selling a dream where AI is the frontend AND the backend is just missing the mark. Everyone is pushing AI everywhere, throwing darts, the game is to pick one dart and make it work.
I get that MSFT as a software provider is in a position to explore the space and create products in all directions, but this vision where everything is AI is akin to a metal fabric reacting to a new metal being discovered, creating a full line of products with this new metal, and selling on the idea of a house built entirely out of numetal, with furniture made of numetal, numetal fridges, numetal kitchen, numetal bath, why not numetal dogs and numetal children?