Show Notes
As AI agents continue to remake the way we communicate with machines, what will become of SaaS companies? In this episode, Robb and Josh are joined by Janelle Teng, Vice President at Bessemer Venture Partners’ San Francisco office, who recently noted that “2024 has not been kind to SaaS companies” on her Next Big Teng blog.
A Stanford scientist and former product manager at Salesforce, Janelle explains why she is bullish on the multi-agent approach to automation. The trio also discuss the ramification of consumer adoption of AI outpacing enterprises and why startups have a clear advantage in this moment.
Discover how to design and orchestrate conversational AI agents for your employees and customers:
Read Jenelle’s insights at nextbigteng.substack.com.
#AIPodcast #InvisibleMachines #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ConversationalAI #AIAgents #SaaS #Automation #TechTrends #Innovation #BusinessStrategy #AIstartups #VC #AIcapital
More from Invisible Machines podcast by UX Magazine
For twenty-five years, Ben Reason and Lavrans Løvlie have been trying to give services the design quality people already expect from a product. Everybody knows what a designed BMW feels like. Almost nobody loves their bank, their hospital, or their mortgage. A product is the contract. A service is everything before it, during it, and after you are done, and it includes the relationships people do not aspire to: tax, a prison, a claim.
Three years after The Song of Significance, Seth Godin returns to Invisible Machines on the day his new book arrives, The Knot: Problems Can Be Solved. The compression of his body of work is now a sorting tool. Most stuckness is not a lack of information, it's an entanglement—two incompatible wants held at once. Effort doesn’t help. You stay stuck until you name the pin, pull it out, and loosen the knot.
The demo works. People start depending on it. Then one morning you have to explain yesterday's decision to someone who wasn't in the room.
Three years after his first Invisible Machines visit, Don Scheibenreif returns with a sharper read on the trough: everybody knows generative AI, almost nobody has answered what it does to the business model. He led Gartner’s Autonomous Business research, the successor to digital business, and co-authored When Machines Become Customers. The through-line is that AI is a tool, the harder question is how to create value with it.
There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that hits when you’re building with AI. You’ve got the license. You’ve got the pilot. You’ve got a chat window that generates whatever you ask for. But then comes the wall—the workflow that almost works, the dependency that loops back on itself, victories that only come when you quietly move the goalposts. In this episode, we talk about how to get around the wall.