Comment by jamestimmins
16 days ago
1. I was prepared my to roll my eyes, but I actually think the framing is correct. AI hasn't replaced legacy vendors yet, but companies are now in a position to at least assess whether "Cheap External Tool + AI" beats "Expensive Tool", which starts to compress margins for existing tooling.
2. A suspicious number of "It's not X, it's Y" in this piece.
I keep thinking about two very different cases wrt existing platforms:
1. My cousin who works for an enterprise real estate SaaS company. He said their main product has iirc 10-20,000 database tables.
2. Evernote users had famously little overlap in which features they used. Everyone use a slightly different subset of Evernote tools.
I wonder if you could create a 2x2 grid of these two scenarios to determine a SaaS tool's likelihood of being replaced with AI.
- Complex Data Model + High feature adoption: Low risk of AI
- Complex Data Model + Low feature adoption: Medium risk short term. High long term.
- Simple data model + High feature adoption: High long term risk risk, but limited ability to grow accouts
- Simple data + low feature adoption: Very high risk