AI agents have the ability to fundamentally change the business model of enterprise software. Today, when you build a SaaS product, the primary business model is to sell seats that are tied to the end-users of your service. For "same store" sales, you can essentially grow at the rate of the headcount growth of that customer, or by adding additional capabilities on top of your offering. This business model is, of course fantastic, and has been around since the earliest days of enterprise software, and will keep going forever.
But AI Agents unlock an entirely new business model in software, because you can now grow in a way that is uncorrelated to direct enterprise headcount or even external factors to your software. What's amazing about this model is that the AI vendor actually can directly grow itself within an enterprise account due to direct productivity gains.
For instance, imagine an AI Agent that can generate outbound sales demand for a startup. Traditionally, B2B companies will start by hiring a very small team of maybe one or two people, and increase resources in this area in a very incremental fashion -- essentially a process that looks like a guessing game where you try to predict how much demand there might be in the market, the ability to fund new resources, and the length of time it takes to hire great talent. In a world of AI Agents, you would simply set a budget and then decide how fast you want to grow. This is much closer to the business model of Google Adwords than it is of a traditional SaaS service.
The same would be true for entirely different functions, where AI Agents can develop software at the rate of how many software projects you want built or how many legal documents you want reviewed -- all unconstrained by a company's headcount. This will even happen in areas where you wouldn't initially expect demand levels to change just because you move to AI, but in fact where there's plenty of latent demand. For instance, in front-line support, in a world where AI Agents can answer a greater set of questions a customer might have, you could see the kind of interaction volumes going up far higher in a world of AI.
This all has major implications to the economics of software, and it means that the AI Agent business model goes after a far greater pool of spend than just traditional IT. If software products now directly *drive* company productivity instead of just *enabling* company productivity, this could lead to a step-function change in the size of IT markets over time. Wild.
The next big breakthrough in AI is AI Agents. This is when AI goes from being used as an assistant to chat with, to using AI to accomplish complete tasks that a human might otherwise have to perform. This moves AI from being a "read-only" operation to fundamentally a "read/write" operation. Ultimately, this brings us much closer to the full promise of AI, in particular in the enterprise, where AI can begin to complete any part of a workflow, and we're already seeing examples today of Agents that write entire software applications or respond to customer support tickets.
Today, in many ways Agents are where cloud computing was in 2007; that is to say, very early. When you extrapolate this trend out over a decade, we can start to imagine what an entirely different enterprise operation might look like. We can easily picture having highly proficient Agents available for every function in an organization, enabling important work to get done far faster than today. The impact of Agents on the enterprise really has no limit, but 3 big implications stand out to me:
1. Businesses of all sizes will have access to resources and specialized skills that they wouldn't otherwise tap into. Bill Joy, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems, famously said "no matter who you are, most of the smartest people work for someone else." Especially for smaller companies, this has always been a disadvantage. Your larger competitors will always be able to tap into a talent pool that you can't afford or access. Whether it's specialized legal support, or scaling a sales team, AI Agents will enable companies of all sizes the same access to resources that were once only the privilege of a large organization.
2. Companies will be able to re-allocate energy and talent to increasingly more differentiating and higher impact work. We know that for various parts of a company, our time is wasted with tasks that computers *should* be remarkably good at solving, but just haven't been able to today. As AI Agents become more robust, many of these activities that we drain our time on can be automated, and we can repurpose time and energy to driving more innovation, getting closer to our customers, better supporting customers, and more.
3. As AI Agents play a meaningful role in the operations of a company, this changes the nature of the IT function, making it even more strategic than today. Today, IT is often focused on enabling software for existing workers or workflows in a company. In the future, a company will go to IT for supplying intellectual horsepower as well to the enterprise. Imagine going to IT not just to say "I need software to help my engineers build my product" but instead, "I need software to engineer my product". You can squint and picture in the coming years even a "Workday for AI" where you manage Agents that are running around augmenting the operations of a company.
And this is just the beginning...
This is Lisa Su. CEO of AMD
Interviewer : Excuse me do you speak English? You are a random person here.
Lisa Su: Yes, I do. I’m with AMD and we are sponsoring the Ferari car. 😂🔥