How will AI Impact SaaS Builders
Michael Cooper hosts Kamal Gupta, Bill Tarr and Markus Kaiser in the first live stream of the show, then called SaaS Mondays, to ask whether AI kills SaaS. The panel says it does not: SaaS is a business model, and Bill Tarr's test for real SaaS is whether a company has a control plane. They cite US VC money going to AI rising from 22% in 2022 to 42% last year, then cover usage-based and outcome-based pricing, including bring-your-own-LLM as a way to cap customer spend. On architecture they discuss per-tenant long-running training jobs with checkpointing on costly GPUs, per-tenant models and RAG, headless SaaS where agents replace the application layer, and tenant isolation. Markus Kaiser adds the European view on data residency. Anyone building or running SaaS gets a practical list of what AI changes in pricing, deployment and multi-tenancy.
Timestamps
00:00Stream opens: welcome to the first live SaaS show05:30Panel introductions from AWS and startup backgrounds08:30Is SaaS dead now that AI agents have arrived?11:00What is agentic SaaS, and where is VC money going?15:30Why SaaS is a business model and the control plane test20:30Will AI change SaaS billing and pricing models?26:00Pay-per-use fears, bring your own LLM, outcome pricing29:00Adding a pre-trained LLM versus training one in SaaS31:30Per-tenant long-running AI jobs and GPU checkpointing34:00Deploying agents in customer accounts with per-tenant RAG36:00What is headless SaaS and the agent layer?38:30Designing data access for AI agents: Moscow example47:00Why build multi-tenancy and the control plane from day one53:00European data residency and privacy for AI agents57:00Closing thoughts: startups, enterprises and VC efficiencyAbout This Episode
- What is "How will AI Impact SaaS Builders" about?
- Michael Cooper hosts Kamal Gupta, Bill Tarr and Markus Kaiser in the first live stream of the show, then called SaaS Mondays, to ask whether AI kills SaaS. The panel says it does not: SaaS is a business model, and Bill Tarr's test for real SaaS is whether a company has a control plane. They cite US VC money going to AI rising from 22% in 2022 to 42% last year, then cover usage-based and outcome-based pricing, including bring-your-own-LLM as a way to cap customer spend. On architecture they discuss per-tenant long-running training jobs with checkpointing on costly GPUs, per-tenant models and RAG, headless SaaS where agents replace the application layer, and tenant isolation. Markus Kaiser adds the European view on data residency. Anyone building or running SaaS gets a practical list of what AI changes in pricing, deployment and multi-tenancy.
- What topics does this episode cover?
- This episode is filed under AI & Agents, SaaS Strategy on Agentic SaaS Talks.
- How long is this episode, and when was it published?
- "How will AI Impact SaaS Builders" runs 64 min and was published on July 1, 2024.
- What are the key moments in this episode?
- Key moments include: Stream opens: welcome to the first live SaaS show; Panel introductions from AWS and startup backgrounds; Is SaaS dead now that AI agents have arrived?; What is agentic SaaS, and where is VC money going?; Why SaaS is a business model and the control plane test; Will AI change SaaS billing and pricing models?; Pay-per-use fears, bring your own LLM, outcome pricing; Adding a pre-trained LLM versus training one in SaaS. The timestamps on this page jump to each one on YouTube.
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