Replatforming Old Ideas

AI is the biggest shift in B2B software since SaaS – bigger and faster than anything we’ve experienced before.

Unlike earlier platform shifts (mainframes to personal computers, on-prem to SaaS, mobile, and so on), AI isn’t about how we deliver software. It’s about how productive a product can be.

A product’s productivity is the value it can drive per hour a human needs to interface with it. AI-enabled products are changing this faster than ever.

Before AI, SaaS products made us more productive because they helped us collaborate, communicate, and improve processes faster than on-prem software or paper ever could.

Intercom was once a great way for customers to chat with support staff. It was amazing. Today, they’ve completely replatformed their product with Fin – their AI agent for customer service. The Danish accounting SaaS Dinero uses Fin for more than 50% of its customer interactions in Intercom. Fin now has a higher customer satisfaction score (93.24%) than their otherwise excellent human support team (91.21%). In this case, Fin handled more than 9,000 interactions in 30 days.

Imagine what a productivity boost Fin is for Dinero.
See Thorborg’s post about it on LinkedIn (in Danish)

With Fin in mind, we have to rethink how much productivity our SaaS products deliver. Gone are the days when a collaborative to-do list was enough. But what hasn’t changed as drastically are the problems that need solving. People still need accounting software, support tools, and the same kinds of SaaS products they buy today. Heck, many companies still need a phone number.

Rethinking old ideas in the age of AI productivity

The idea of AI-driven productivity has made me revisit some of my old product ideas.

What would a business phone look like if it were designed to increase productivity with AI?

It could:

• Have conversations with customers – think Fin, but for the phone (they’re already doing this)
• Transcribe all your calls and make them searchable
• Summarize conversations and extract to-dos – think about all the times you’ve spoken with a tradesperson who forgot to follow up after hanging up
• Automatically generate welcome messages – no need for a professional sound studio like we used to have
• Let you chat with customers (based on transcribed calls) to learn how to improve your business
• Provide real-time feedback on sales and support calls

The list could go on.

You can take any SaaS product and rethink it with AI productivity in mind. This is the biggest opportunity to take on old incumbents slow to replatform that we’ve seen since SaaS beat the hell out of on-prem.

AI won’t lead to the death of SaaS – businesses still have problems that require specific software to solve. But products that don’t replatform with AI will be killed fast.

If you want to dig deeper into replatforming with AI, listen to Acquired’s excellent episode “Google: The AI Company.”.