Jim Whitehurst

CEO @Unity. Special Advisor @Silverlake. Former President @IBM. Former CEO @RedHat. Author of the book that inspired @OpenOrgProject.

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

A great take on the impact of AI on SaaS businesses!

[Spenser Skates @spenserskates]

The State of AI in SaaS:
SaaS is Dead, Long Live SaaS

This started as an analysis of Andrej Karpathy's excellent overview of AI's capabilities. Those who deeply understand this will make all the returns and everyone else will lose a lot of money.

"Ghosts" is a brilliant metaphor for what we've created. They're not animals, and they're definitely not human. They are imperfect replicas of us. Karpathy describes them as a "statistical distillation of humanity's documents".

AI channels that distribution more effectively than any human and can beat us at Go, schoolwork, analyzing medical images, and many well defined tasks. At the same time, it lacks the reward systems that humans use to improve including curiosity, empowerment, play, intrinsic motivation, and culture.

As a result, AI's capabilities are limited. If you watch how the best work gets done with AI, it happens in chunks where a human supervises the output and gives iterative feedback to the AI. Large scale autonomous agents are brittle and fail quickly. Watch anyone vibe code an application with any level of novel complexity.

AI also faces integration barriers into existing organizations. AI is not capable of pulling a lot of the levers you need to be effective like coordinating with multiple stakeholders, building trust, authenticity, and interacting with different modalities across time and space. You could argue that the average human doesn't either, but people know when they're interacting with an AI and don't allow it the same agency as they do to people. The most successful AI B2B companies actually need more humans to integrate what they've built (forward deployed engineers) than traditional B2B SaaS.

What's next?

Those who understand AI and its limitations will transform the industry.

Incumbents will be killed by those who know how to leverage AI. I've seen countless homepages talk about being the "AI platform for AI agents" but can't even string a demo together. Meanwhile they're trying to pitch a future where fully autonomous entities collaborate in parallel to write all the code and humans are useless. They will be the first to be replaced when they get surpassed by AI native companies.

The investors blindly throwing money into companies at 100x multiples are going to lose their money. I spoke with one of the most disciplined investors I know last week. They said they felt they had to play the game on the field even though they knew it didn't make sense. And this was from someone who is closer to the technology than 95% of investors.

On the other hand, companies who deeply understand AI will win everything. Cursor, Glean, Decagon, Sierra, Linear, Lovable, Replit, Bolt, and many AI natives are off to a great start.

While 90% of incumbents haven't adapted, it is possible. Figma, Notion, Vercel, Box, and Intercom have done a great job of tearing down what they have and rebuilding AI native products. They have teams who are close to the current capabilities of the models. They also understand their problem domain and as new capabilities come out know what capabilities will map well to what problems in what way. They are able to deliver on AI's promise to their customers. Whereas the majority of existing companies will die.

In analytics, the door is wide open. In spite of many of our competitors filling up their homepages with the text "AI", I haven't seen a single compelling demo. We're still working like it's 2015.

This will change. We have spent the last year at Amplitude rebuilding our team to be AI native. We've learned about what models are capable of, how to write prompts, and how to leverage evals for building great products. We've worked with our customers to see what gets used in practice and what doesn't. We are building a vision for the future of analytics. We are all in on AI at Amplitude.

Stay tuned for what's next. We're going to be fast and furious with AI products at Amplitude.

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

I love to watch open source continue to be a disruptive force for innovation! @deepseek_ai is amazing!

[Spenser Skates @spenserskates]

It's not every day that I get to talk about something that I think will change the future of analytics. Today is one of those days.

Introducing: Snowflake Native Amplitude

One of the top requests we get from data leaders is to be able to leverage all the investment they've made in their Data Cloud with Snowflake by having Amplitude run directly on top of the data.

Today we are able to deliver on that promise. Snowflake Native Amplitude is the same Amplitude Analytics our users know and love, completely replatformed on Snowflake. No ETL, no multiple copies of the data, no issues with data drift or mutability. Amplitude querying directly on top of Snowflake via SQL and returning the results in our point and click dashboards.

@curtisbliu and our engineering team spent the last 3 years creating a version of Amplitude Analytics that works with SQL natively on top of Data Warehouses. This required a massive engineering effort. We rebuilt all of our chart querying capabilities, from segmentation, to funnels, to retention, to journeys, to event properties, to every other chart type on top of the data warehouse. We needed to ensure essential features like user timelines, complex segments, microscope, and cohorts worked effectively in the same way as they did on our existing custom Nova database. We then spent a huge amount of time optimizing the hell out of the performance. (Data Warehouses are SLOW if you don't tune them correctly, particularly on critical reports like funnels and user journeys.)

As a result, @Amplitude_HQ is now the first fully replatformed enterprise app on @SnowflakeDB. It just works. Sign up for free and start using it right away!

We also believe in this so much that we are going big right out of the gate with the launch. Anyone can use full Amplitude analytics, up to 5 seats, completely free of charge.

Data leaders have been begging me for this functionality from Amplitude for years. We are excited to finally deliver it today. Read more (and signup!) on Snowflake Native Amplitude here: https://t.co/0B8Uo7uRgb

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

Trace Gotsis at @Tonal crushed me this am. Tired, but I do love Tonal for weight training.

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

Big congrats to @TenChambers on their newly announced game. It looks so good #TheGameAwards

[Den of Wolves @denofwolvesgame]

Enter Midway City, an unregulated innovation zone backed by business entities with no human rights agencies to appease.

Plan and execute heists through industrial espionage, sabotage, theft, and assassination.

Enter the Den of Wolves.
https://t.co/caW5rIfEZ3

#denofwolves

[Den of Wolves @denofwolvesgame]

Enter Midway City, an unregulated innovation zone backed by business entities with no human rights agencies to appease.

Plan and execute heists through industrial espionage, sabotage, theft, and assassination.

Enter the Den of Wolves.
https://t.co/caW5rIfEZ3

#denofwolves

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

Hope to see you at our #Unite2023 keynote today!

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

Feeling energized from yesterday's team and customer meetings at the Unity Copenhagen office where it all started. Now in Amsterdam for #Unite2023. Can't wait to see developers, customers, partners and employees there!

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

Hope that’s enough stuff to get me through the next few months!

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

@RJdoesVR @HoldenLink Thanks!

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

Had fun recording a podcast with an old friend and sectionmate from HBS.....https://t.co/ifgRoYHcJ6

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

Just finished How the Future Works. Highly recommend it! https://t.co/hHk2yH9xVX

[Atlanta Falcons @AtlantaFalcons]

It's #FalconsFriday and we're back at home‼️

RT for your chance to win a signed Kyle Pitts football.

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

@jhibbets @openorgproject @EmilyStancil @kimjokisch @ruhbehka @mackanic @andreabferrara What a great time and wonderful group of people!

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

The heart of leadership is creating context for our teams do extraordinary things in increasingly ambiguous environments. Hear what I mean and let me know what you think as I reflect on one year of #AnOpenConversationWithJim https://t.co/AaN4IN0Vj5

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

Many aspects of an organization's culture are operating in our subconscious. Hear what I mean and let me know what you think. https://t.co/7vYWD9xpg4
#AnOpenConversationWithJim

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

One of the hardest parts of innovation is having the courage to act, decide, and prioritize quickly. Hear what I mean and let me know what you think. 
#AnOpenConversationWithJim #leadership #OODA https://t.co/E7RHbrfTGl

[IBM @IBM]

⚡️Join us as we celebrate our 110th birthday. 🎉

Take a minute to explore some iconic IBM moments that have made a lasting impact on our industry and the world.

What’s your favorite IBM milestone?

[Jim Whitehurst @JWhitehurst]

Interactions are a benefit, and a leader's role is to help manage meeting dynamics so teams can be as effective as possible. Hear what I mean and let me know what you think. 
#AnOpenConversationWithJim #leadership https://t.co/HLJ5niZ25Q