Comment by sublinear
4 hours ago
I think you just precisely laid out why replacing SaaS with AI doesn't work.
Every contract is different and the majority of the work is "the boring inefficient stuff" that can't be automated away. That is, arguing with shifty and arrogant middle management in a long series of meetings until you get some concrete requirements. Then realizing the metric shit ton of crap to untangle and test rigorously. It's not just a matter of having patience, but being unflinchingly attentive the whole time for the nuggets of gold that fall out of their disgusting mouths and then pouncing with a plan so you don't go over time and budget. AI simply isn't going to grill people like that and then execute swiftly and precisely. A lot of these jobs really are like a murder interrogation and then finding the bodies.
It's absurd that so many people believe there are unturned stones in this space. If this kind of business could be cookie-cutter, it would have happened over a decade ago and it wouldn't have made any money.
I think I mostly agree with you.
But I believe a premise of the article is that AI-ification will disrupt the power of those middle managers, probably in a few different ways.
One is that the middle managers themselves will be replaced by AI. Another is that more purchasing decisions will be made by engineers building the corporate harness on the buyer side. And, probably people will be more accustomed (i.e. forced) to talk to AIs on the other side, or at least accept that the responses are ultimately constrained by them. Going out for a round of golf with the sales guy just can't accomplish anything anymore.
Every exec team wants this transition to happen, so both buy and sell side will go through great transformation in concert.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this argument hinges on AI not really being intelligent.
If we're talking automation in the way that humans define a process, boundary cases, etc up front then yes you can't really automate away one-off monotony.
If AI is actually artificial intelligence, it will be able to figure that out similar to how a human would.
I compared it to interrogation because it's about steering the conversation. The only reason you're talking to middle management is because their work is getting outsourced to SaaS.
If you waste too much time on irrelevant topics, you lose. If you don't collect enough information, you lose. If the middle manager feels threatened, you lose. If you don't have a good production release, you lose. If there are any high severity bugs, you lose. If there are too many bugs, you lose.
The only way to win is to carve an exact path through the mess from the beginning, and that needs human experience.
Maybe we just have different ideas of what AI would be?
I don't consider an impressive text predictor to be artificial intelligence. Maybe that means LLMs aren't AI, I honestly don't know because no one seems to care about understanding how they work or solving interpetability first.
I do expect anything that earns the banner of AI could ask good questions, weed through a bunch of word vomit to find the key nuggets, and act on them similar to or better than a human could. Anything less than that doesn't seem particularly intelligent.