SaaStr

APRIL 9, 2024

At SaaStr’s AI Day, George Kreitler, Global IBM Embeddable AI Sales Leader, talks about the paradox of AI, three equations that relate to the world productivity and AI, a little math to help guide the next decade, top use cases, and the importance of responsible AI. Why does this matter in the world of AI?

AI 223

AI Outsourcing Services Outsourced Development Government 223

SaaStr

MAY 16, 2024

They dive into the nuances of topics like: Evolving dynamics of remote work The most effective marketing channels of 2024 Owned assets vs. “walled gardens” The practical realities vs. the hype around AI As everyone here at SaaStr knows, Jason sold his first company, Echosign, for $400M. Crappy support bots have been around forever.

Sales Recruiting 228

Sales Recruiting AI Search B2B Sales Hiring 228

Tom Tunguz

MARCH 20, 2024

Will AI sofware companies operate with better or worse profitability than a classic SaaS company? Initially, I thought worse since the expense of serving AI as a product is signficantly higher. AI SaaS may be much more profitable than the -10% average net income margins of the current crop of public businesses. Deflationary.

AI Search 189

AI Search AI Scale SaaS 189

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 21, 2023

People have said “AI” more this year than any other year combined. Everyone is looking forward to what AI can do for them in business. PST, the CIO and SVP of IT at Freshworks, Prasad Ramakrishnan, shares five ways organizations can leverage AI to solve problems and grow. But this AI wave is slightly different.

AI 227

AI Scale Generative AI Sales Hiring 227

SaaStr

MAY 8, 2024

Some people are unwilling to work in the current environment and blame it on customers and the macro. You have to be careful to measure where money is going, and anything that gets you a customer is worth it. Ultimately, all the top software companies’ number one source of customers is word of mouth. It’s supposed to be hard.

Metrics 210

Metrics Scale Sales Hiring SaaS 210

SaaStr

APRIL 3, 2024

As the kickoff to our first fully digital SaaStr AI Day, Jennifer Tejada , the CEO of PagerDuty, chatted with Jason Lemkin, SaaStr CEO and Founder, about navigating the shift to Generative AI and what Artificial Intelligence in SaaS might look like in the next 6 months, as well as years to come. How to Buck Up and Go Long in SaaS?

Generative AI 235

Generative AI AI Technical Review Software Review 235

Totango

MAY 17, 2024

Some believe AI is overhyped. A recent poll taken during the Higher Logic Super Forum SPARK conference in April says 61% of CS professionals sometimes use AI platforms alongside other systems, while 11% always leverage AI in various instances and workflows. But there are proven, compliant ways to drive impact with AI today.

Innovation 89

Innovation AI Underperforming Technical Team Scale 89

SaaStr

DECEMBER 18, 2023

AI adoption has grown exponentially over the past year and it has likely doubled from its more than 2.5x At SaaStr Annual , IBM’s VP of Software and Technology Raj Datta and Director of Startups Kylie Rutherford shared how AI is changing the game for companies of all sizes. How to scale AI across your business.

AI 239

AI Technology Scale Startup 239

SaaStr

MAY 4, 2024

Second, Gorgias sees big wins for AI in Support — But When Done Carefully. Across the SaaStr Fund portfolio , we can see a lot of different impacts of AI. Gorgias has taken a measured approach, using automation and AI only when it is 99% sure it will work. Their AI agent is often in the Top 5% for CSAT.

AI 156

AI Mobile B2B Investment 156

SaaStr

JANUARY 11, 2024

Prequel is solving this problem, allowing vendors to offer export functionality into a customer’s database, or customers can request import functionality from a vendor’s data. The big winners in AI have likely not been started yet. #5. The big winners in AI have likely not been started yet. #5.

Technical Review 273

Technical Review Scale Management Sales Hiring 273

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 30, 2023

Last week, Harvard Business School released its analysis of LLMs on 758 consultants’ performance when using AI. In the first experiment (inside AI’s capability frontier), consultants randomly assigned access to GPT-4 AI completed 12.2% This rising-tide effect seems common across AI applications.

AI 209

AI Artificial Intelligence Consulting Customer Support 209

SaaStr

DECEMBER 29, 2023

In part one of this week’s Ask-Me-Anything (AMA) with SaaStr founder and CEO Jason Lemkin, he answered the community’s questions about whether all anyone cares about is AI anymore, investor appetites going into 2024, vertical SaaS, and thriving as a solo founder. Before, humans graded the outcome of customer support. I doubt it.”

Scale 231

Scale Sales Hiring Customer Success AI 231

Andreessen Horowitz

MAY 13, 2024

Prospective customers of this company’s new widget will happily pay $500/year, but not a dollar more. You can’t charge enough to support your sales team, much less the other fixed costs of the business. There’s a whole category of AI tools that are fast-growing and everyone is rightfully excited about. How will this company do?

Venture Capital 110

Venture Capital AI Business Model Cloud 110

SaaStr

JANUARY 7, 2024

Check out this week’s top blog posts, podcasts, and videos: Top Blog Posts This Week: The Beginning of The End of Customer Success, SDRs, and Support Agents A Low Burn Multiple is Great. How IBM Sees AI Changing the Game for Companies of All Sizes We End the Year at All-Time Lows for SaaS Growth.

Venture Capital 230

Venture Capital Scale AI Customer Success 230

Tom Tunguz

APRIL 24, 2024

Palo Alto Networks’ customers who buy security across 3 platforms spend more than 40x those that secure just one. Dropzone provides AI SOC analysts that never sleep. These agents also inform copilots that empower security analysts to ask questions of their environment leveraging the insight of the AI analysts.

AI 158

AI Systems Review Innovation Enterprise 158

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 15, 2024

Metronome is a cutting-edge billing infrastructure company designed to support the rapid growth and adaptability required by modern software companies. Enterprise software–at all stages and check sizes–with a focus on SaaS, Security, Infrastructure and, of course, with an integrated AI strategy. I am not sure there is just one!

Scale 233

Scale Software Review Payment Features AI 233

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 26, 2023

How is AI going to impact the software and SaaS landscape of the next couple of years and also the next 5-10 years? Kristina Shen, General Partner at a16z, shares some insights into the present and future of generative AI at this week’s Workshop Wednesday, held every Wednesday at 10 a.m. For B2B Generative AI Apps, Is Less More?

AI 255

AI Generative AI Venture Capital SaaS 255

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 5, 2023

90% of startups have plans or have released an AI feature, 54% of those features will launch in 2023, but only 30% of companies are hiring new people to do it, according to ProductBoard’s survey. These figures highlight three points: AI has become an essential product component for most software companies.

Artificial Intelligence 258

Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning AI Payments 258

Tom Tunguz

SEPTEMBER 6, 2023

But it also might start to analyze customers’ behavior in online webinars, conversations with customer support and sales teams, and more - all of which is unstructured data stored in video & raw text & audio files. Data lakes allow for the storage of both structured and unstructured data at scale.

Artificial Intelligence 294

Artificial Intelligence Software Data Scale 294

SaaS Metrics

DECEMBER 23, 2021

A knowledge management system (KMS) is a tool that helps put knowledge management ideas into practice & provides self-service to customers in modules like FAQs, decision trees for customer service, one-pager articles, and many more. A knowledge.

AI 40

AI Management Business Model Metrics 40

SaaStr

OCTOBER 25, 2023

Bigger Customers Keep Growing, But SMBs Have Slowed A common theme across tech today. Freshworks has 51,700 customers at around $2k ARR, with a quick close of just 25 days. But in contrast to their bigger customers, the macro environment — or perhaps market saturation — has led to slowing growth in this segment in 2023. #2.

SMB 249

SMB AI Onboarding Cloud 249

User Pilot

MAY 21, 2024

Functionality is a must when it comes to attracting customers, but it’s user experience that helps you retain them. Read this article to discover 17 UX design principles to drive customer satisfaction and loyalty. By following the principles, you can increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and retention. Book the demo!

User Experience 102

User Experience AI Scale Customer Support 102

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

Is it the end of an era for customer success in SaaS? We just wrote up how some of the biggest changes of SaaS are now coming, specifically in Customer Success and Sales. Customer Success Is Vulnerable to Cuts Jason shared that he didn’t realize how vulnerable customer success was to cuts until 2023. Let’s dive in.

Sales Hiring 247

Sales Hiring Customer Success Scale AI 247

SaaStr

MARCH 22, 2024

Dear SaaStr: How Do You Handle Customers That Want to Build It In-House? And we’re even seeing a bit of renaissance here again, as many try to build apps on ChatGPT and OpenAI themselves instead of through an established, pre-AI vendor. The post Dear SaaStr: How Do You Handle Customers That Want to Build It In-House?

ChatGPT 210

ChatGPT Innovation AI Branding 210

User Pilot

APRIL 24, 2024

Generative AI has changed how tech companies do business. companies use AI in their operations and the number of jobs requiring AI has increased by 450% since 2013. In 2023, over 26% of investments in American startups were directed toward AI-related companies. How to implement AI to build better products.

AI 96

AI Artificial Intelligence SaaS Generative AI 96

SaaStr

DECEMBER 17, 2023

Replayz.io – It autoscores sales calls according to our specific call frameworks with AI. Maybe the shift to the data warehouse as the source of truth (Snowflake for us) and AI change my opinion here though. #4. Momentum.io – It’s like Troops with AI on steroids. SalesForce Snowflake SalesLoft Gong Replayz.io

Scale 246

Scale AI Leadership Innovation 246

Tom Tunguz

JULY 25, 2023

There are two forces in tension : overall cost reduction efforts by companies & the desire to invest in AI. The desire for AI is broad. Microsoft’s Azure Open AI customer base grew 4x by count, up from 2500 last quarter : We have great momentum across Azure OpenAI Service.

Azure 202

Azure GCP(Google Cloud Platform) AI Cloud 202

Clouded Judgement

DECEMBER 1, 2023

Couple takeaways for me: 2024 is shaping up to be the “prototype to production” year for AI. When it comes to vector search / support, they will make that available in all of their databases Customizations are coming. A strong data foundation is critical for an effective AI strategy!

AWS 293

AWS Cloud AI Search Cost optimization & reporting 293

SaaStr

DECEMBER 21, 2023

Series B is where the go-to-market expertise is essential – you have to know how to truly understand who your target customers are and set up an experimental channel strategy. Generative AI is spawning new companies and accelerating existing ones. What’s different about your fund / how you invest and support founders?

Scale 227

Scale Venture Capital AI Generative AI 227

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 10, 2023

Zendesk AI automates customer support. Salesforce launched AI Cloud. Then draft an email to each prospect using data from their customer support tickets & save them in my drafts folder. That’s a level of automation rarely seen within the enterprise without custom coding.

Software Review 212

Software Review SaaS Systems Review AI 212

User Pilot

MAY 22, 2024

Reporting : Most A/B testing tools support automatic and real-time reports. As a full-fledged product growth platform , Userpilot also supports A/B testing. Other advanced features include conditions and AI content translation. Custom coding options are available, too. A/B testing settings.

Software 105

Software Scale AI Mobile 105

SaaStr

OCTOBER 20, 2023

AI is rapidly changing the way we work. It’s only been ten months since ChatGPT launched, and since then, we’ve seen a huge increase in AI applications being created and used globally. They couldn’t figure out chatbots, support, or that next level. After the launch of ChatGPT, they went from 30 leads a week to 10,000.

ChatGPT 237

ChatGPT AI Search Scale Sales Hiring 237

SaaStr

DECEMBER 5, 2023

So Sam Jacobs and the team at Pavilion had me join their podcast and it ended up being a pretty fun deep dive into where markets are today, the role of customer success in a tougher market, and much more. There’s concern that valuation trends seemed to mimic previous market bubbles.

Investment 148

Investment Scale Sales Hiring Marketing 148

SaaStr

APRIL 5, 2023

And the second was LivePerson, to handle chat and support. I fell so in love with support automation, when I invested, I did a ton in support, from Talkdesk (first VC), to Front, to Gorgias (#1 e-commerce contact center) to MaestroQA and more. Customer Count Down, But # of Bigger Enterprise Deals is Up. All in the Cloud!

Scale 245

Scale AI Scaling Enterprise 245

SaaStr

MAY 9, 2024

Adam, Dean, and the team at Owner are quietly building one of the fastest-growing B2B platforms out there by helping restaurants take back their customer relationships. What’s different about your fund / how you invest and support founders? What’s your pulse check on the venture markets right now, today? Cautious optimism.

Scale 205

Scale Headcount Travel B2B 205