Generative AI failed to replace SaaS

Satya Nadella & others preached about GenAI replacing the "Business Logic" or the "Middle Tier" layer of various SaaS services. The idea was that users would interact with a GenAI model (via a chat interface), and then the model would interact directly with a database. This would have obviously mooted the need for almost all SaaS applications.

What's been happening instead is that GenAI has been moving up the "stack," further and further away from the database. No one's talking about replacing SaaS anymore. Instead, GenAI has become a sort of garnish, something that you sprinkle ON TOP of existing SaaS applications without truly replacing any of their pre-existing features.

This shift "up the stack" speaks volumes to the impotence of our current models. They are so incapable and unreliable that they couldn't replace a single part of Excel, for example. Instead, all Microsoft did was "slap GenAI on top", placing the burden on users to "figure out" how to make it useful. We went from "replace it with a chat agent" to "just slap a chat agent on top and hope for the best." In other words, we actually made our SaaS applications MORE complicated instead of consolidating their features and therefore simplifying them.