AI is becoming the engine inside SaaS

I don’t buy the idea that AI will replace every app and leave us doing everything through one generic chat box.

We’ve seen versions of this pendulum swing before. Mainframes concentrated computing in one place. Client/server pushed it out to individual machines, giving us flexibility and a different set of management problems. Hybrid and cloud approaches brought those ideas back together in more practical combinations.

I think AI is going through a similar period of overcorrection. We had specialized, rule-based applications. Now there’s a rush to replace them with prompts and agents, sometimes losing the workflow detail that made the applications useful in the first place.

My bet is on AI and applications working together. The AI becomes a power user inside the software, helping people get more out of tools that already understand a particular job.

The companies that benefit most won’t necessarily be the ones that throw away their existing stack. They’ll be the ones that use AI to unlock more of what it can do. I see AI becoming the engine under the hood of SaaS, rather than its replacement.