Anthropic Threat Sparks ‘SaaSpocalypse’

12 thoughts on “Anthropic Threat Sparks ‘SaaSpocalypse’”

1. “According to the above-mentioned piece published in The Information, Cowork’s ok if you have “some facility in coding,” but even there it’s “a bumpy experience.” It’s difficult, the article went on, “to imagine the product taking off with a general audience until it offers a gentler learning curve.”

   Thanks for that bit of common sense.

   Maybe companies will be forced to hire back some junior coders. Or force companies which relied on packaged software rather than develop it in house to hire some coders. Which might seem to contradict the promise that AI will reduce your costs.

2. This is a true story: my daughter works in finance for an international public company. Last year, the company spent about $1M on “AI based” software to provide some detailed financial analysis that was being requested by upper management.
   Nine months and $1.2M later, the AI software didn’t deliver.
   My daughter excels at Excel. She weirdly loves using Excel, and is adept at utilizing the more complicated functions for data sets, calculations, etc. She spent her spare time at work, over a 3 week period, developing an Excel spreadsheet that provided the requested info.
   At this point, the AI project has been “shelved” in lieu of an Excel spreadsheet. I guess “garbage in, garbage out” can also be applied to AI software.

   1. thanks for sharing, these real world stories are very enlightening

   2. More importantly, I hope that she got the credit that she deserved. Good on her.

      1. She doesn’t want a career- she is super capable, but just wants to stay home (she declined to go back to the office, in lieu of working from home) and have children. She doesn’t want a promotion and can’t wait to leave her job. Unfortunately, she will need money. These 2 things don’t “mesh”.
         I’m just watching her navigate her life (not how I did it, but that is probably a good thing), but I might make a “low-key” suggestion that she learn Claude (she’s smart and could do it) and set up her own consulting business in her industry. She has a lot of connections.

   3. Certainly that is true: garbage in, garbage out. What I’m seeing a lof of is that companies have a strong sense that they need to do something with AI, but they’re not sure what. A lot of leadership is then abdicating the decisions the same way they always have: delegate to IT, hire a consultant, buy some packaged software ‘solution.’
      AI will reflect whatever you give it and ask of it, so it’s on the user to learn how to apply strategic thinking and use AI to supplement what they already do faster, smarter or more efficiently.

      1. AI will be done in by a lack of applications capable of making money. Right now the money is mostly being made in infrastructure. It will be more useful when a couple of huge “killer apps appear. Chat bots aren’t killer apps They are just annoying.

   4. The old consulting saw that you can get your solution fast, cheap or correct, but are limited to just two of those three options does not apply in this case. She delivered faster, cheaper and “correcter.” This consultant (me) hopes she got/gets a $1+ million bonus and/or some short vesting options as an exempt employee.

   5. Our finance ops teams leverage a lot of Excel macros and formulas to automate things AI can do. They work great until you try to scale them, now you effectively have what should be a database driven solution living in a fragile spreadsheet that has to be carefully managed and protected.

      What would probably be more effective is to build an algorithm or stack of algorithms that can execute the same functionality with load balancing and database replicas that runs on a schedule to produce the reporting requested without a human having to do the manual labor.

      But I agree with your point, AI is ubiquitous and in places where it really can’t execute well.

3. As someone who works in the Claude app almost daily, I think you probably need to spend a little more time with Cowork. Yes, it can parse a CSV file, or 15 of them. It can also draw conclusions about that data, construct a new .XLSX with formulas applied to provide you with a fully baked spreadsheet to send out. It can parse all of your documents, draw conclusions and then generate a PPTX for you to present. A new thing it’s started doing is generating interactive web pages that tell a much better story than a slide deck can and really wow your audience.

   Outside of Cowork, Claude Code is able to build you a custom SaaS solution within days that has all of the integrations you need, all of the access controls you want, and is capable of being hardened to the point of passing all security checks. It can then integrate with whatever hosting provider you choose and manage your deployment for you. Why would a company pay a SaaS firm to sell them services that never meet SLA’s and don’t natively integrate with all of their services when they can hire a couple of mid-level devs with Anthropic API accounts instead?

   That’s the real threat right there.

   1. And the real opportunity

4. In Q3 it was OpenAI scooping Anthropic; in Q4 it was Google scooping everyone; now it’s Anthropic scooping the economy. When will we learn that these people have mastered PR (using their own tools which master language) and that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, to quote a wise man I read over the weekend?

   Not that AI isn’t disruptive, not that it isn’t transforming the very nature of the work I do and forcing me to innovate, when I’d rather coast into an early retirement. But they can’t ALL be game-changers, these press releases. Sooner or later we need to wise up!

   (This month’s experiment is, in fact, to use Claude as much as possible for my work. It’s not going well for Claude qua Claude, but the context-engineering magic that Claude’s fans have built up around it is proving beautifully novel and useful AND it works with other vendors’ models. The human factor has once again prevailed in the productivity battle, where AI is so far an enabler…)