So I caught up the other day with the CTO of a leading SaaS company with tens of thousands of customers, growing quickly. AI is all over their homepage and website and comms.
I asked him about a particular use case for AI, and his answer shocked me a bit: “Honestly, our AI is basically still in beta. It’s rolled out to about a tenth of the customers we plan to, and the uses cases are pretty simple today.”
This is a leader in SaaS. And I think this is true at many leaders. ZoomInfo has rocketed to $100m in AI Copilot already. But it mostly is enhancing the classic product, near as I can tell. The same with other leaders. Agentforce at Salesforce is Benioff’s #1 push — but it’s literally just getting started:
Let’s be clear: a lot of SaaS and B2B apps are still experimenting with AI. Or at least, in the beta phase.
They’ve added some cool stuff, but in many cases it’s in a quiet beta, or only used a little bit, or just being rolled out, etc. In vertical SaaS, many are even further “behind”.
I don’t know what 2025 will bring.
But I do believe most SaaS apps will look a lot different by the end of the year
Most are just barely getting started in adding true AI automation to their products and workflows, no matter what they claim on their website.
The biggest mistake you can make in AI is to assume that because something can’t be done today, it will remain that way. The biggest opportunities will be in areas that specifically can’t fully be solved by AI today, because they’ll be dismissed by incumbents.
— Aaron Levie (@levie) December 31, 2024
What more can you do in 2025? What will AI truly bring to your app and competitors’ apps in 2025? How will you get ahead? How will you not be left behind?
Even the best CTOs are just getting started here.
