With the pressure to redefine a value proposition for SaaS companies under the threat of AI, the first move I'm seeing (as evidenced by my email inbox) is the addition of AI "features" to horizontal SaaS apps. That parking app? That bulk email sender? That barbershop-finder app? All of these are somehow better if you just sprinkle a little AI on them as a cure-all, like Robitussin.
SaaS companies that overinvested in expensive customer acquisition teams over the last five years are scrambling to keep their solutions relevant, as well as drum up new investment to stem the cash burn while they find a defensive position to withstand the wave of LLMs and GenAI tools being created every week. Whether or not these features truly add capabilities that benefit users is up in the air. It's all about capturing investor dollars in the short term, with the hope of translating that investment into customer dollars later.
For those of us of a certain age; this is a near-carbon copy replay of the move by enterprise software companies to rename themselves "dotcoms", and make their on-premise software run in a browser, simply to stay relevant in the transition to the Internet.
What's lost in the proliferation of features is the understanding that customers don't pay for features but for capabilities. The companies that can harness AI to create new capabilities for their users will survive this period; those that don't are simply throwing feature spaghetti on the wall and hoping that something sticks. Even if nothing does, you can probably use Robitussin to get that stain out.