Ben Thompson has an interesting take on AI and SaaS which focuses on practical aspects of implementing AI in legacy companies. In his daily update on 13 January 2024, he wrote:
"If something similar plays out with AI agents, then the most important AI customers will primarily be new companies, and probably a lot of them will be long tail type entities that take the barrel and ammunition analogy to its logical extreme. Traditional companies, meanwhile, will struggle to incorporate AI (outside of whole-scale job replacement a la the mainframe); the true AI takeover of enterprises that retain real world differentiation will likely take years.
None of this is to diminish what is coming with AI; rather, as the saying goes, the future may arrive but be unevenly distributed, and, contrary to what you might think, the larger and more successful a company is the less they may benefit in the short term. Everything that makes a company work today is about harnessing people — and the entire SaaS ecosystem is predicated on monetizing this reality; the entities that will truly leverage AI, however, will not be the ones that replace them, but start without them."
Ben Thompson has an interesting take on AI and SaaS which focuses on practical aspects of implementing AI in legacy companies. In his daily update on 13 January 2024, he wrote:
"If something similar plays out with AI agents, then the most important AI customers will primarily be new companies, and probably a lot of them will be long tail type entities that take the barrel and ammunition analogy to its logical extreme. Traditional companies, meanwhile, will struggle to incorporate AI (outside of whole-scale job replacement a la the mainframe); the true AI takeover of enterprises that retain real world differentiation will likely take years.
None of this is to diminish what is coming with AI; rather, as the saying goes, the future may arrive but be unevenly distributed, and, contrary to what you might think, the larger and more successful a company is the less they may benefit in the short term. Everything that makes a company work today is about harnessing people — and the entire SaaS ecosystem is predicated on monetizing this reality; the entities that will truly leverage AI, however, will not be the ones that replace them, but start without them."
Here's the (paywalled) link to the full article: https://stratechery.com/2025/ais-uneven-arrival/