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The Impact of Gen AI on Enterprise SaaS Today
Ft. Sandhya Hegde - Unusual VC General Partner
Amardeep Parmar
September 10, 2023
Hello hello, today we have Sandhya Hegde who is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures who focus on early stage companies. Sandhya's specialism is early stage SaaS.
She was previously EVP at Amplitude and worked at both Khosla Ventures and Sequoia Capital.
We’re covering The Impact of Gen AI on Enterprise SaaS Today.
The Impact of Gen AI on Enterprise SaaS Today
Here are some of the key takeaways from the episode if you’re in a rush!
Chat isn’t everything
“The end product just looks dramatically different for the consumer and enterprise markets. The mistake we often see a lot of founders making is not appreciated that nuance.”
ChatGPT has generated a lot of hype online but a lot of nightmares for enterprise compliance. Companies have so many more considerations when it comes to using AI such as making sure they aren’t sued!
Enterprise SaaS needs to give users much more control and ensure that they aren’t breaching any copyrights. The interface needs to allow a company to be confident their data is always safe.
Unstructured world
“You can do a couple orders magnitude of automation now even where there is unstructured data involved”
The world suddenly woke up to the power of AI recently but Sandhya has been in the game for much longer and has a deeper understanding. Many of the features the average person has discovered in the last year, isn’t actually technically that impressive.
The big change according to Sandhya is now AI can handle unstructured data too. Before only structured data was considered for automation but now pandora’s box has been opened.
More than time
“Not just to save time. I think that’s actually the least exciting reason. It’s to be able to do things you just couldn’t do before.”
Half of LinkedIn focuses on how much time savings you can get from AI but for enterprises, these tasks were often relatively cheap anyway.
The big leap is how AI can put features on the roadmap that were previously considered impossible. This is what you should be focusing on. What AI-empowered tool can you build which drives transformational change for users.
Discount AI
“I have an order of magnitude discount for AI. If usually I thought having a waiting list of 1000 users is good then if you’re in AI, you better have 10,000.”
It’s funny how many people became “The AI guy” or “The Prompt Guy” in the last year after showing zero interest in AI before. They’re riding a hype wave and often it works.
But for how long? As people become more used to AI tools, they’ll be much harder to impress and retention could drop off a cliff for early movers. Revenue generating customers matter more than sign ups and people just expressing interest.
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Sabrina Castiglione (COO at Pento) - How To Use Automation As A Product Differentiator
Lloyed Lobo (Founder of Boost.AI & Traction) - How To Leverage Community For Rapid Growth
Ali Tajskander (Founder of Wishpond) - How To Use Acquisitions To Grow Your Business