Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had earlier predicted a bleak future for SaaS companies, saying that AI agents will eat their lunch, but NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has a diametrically opposite view on the situation.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has said that SaaS platforms won’t be disrupted by AI, and might even flourish because they’re sitting on a “goldmine”. “People say that these SaaS platforms are gonna be disrupted,” he said on a podcast. “I actually think the opposite. They’re sitting on a goldmine. There is going to be this flourishing of agents that are going to be specialized in (particular SaaS platforms). And what an exciting future for them that they have all these agents that that sit on top of their tools platform, that use the tools platform, and collaborate with with other platforms, and you’ll do that as a service,” he said.
Huang’s view is in contrast to what Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella had said a few weeks ago. Nadella had said that SaaS applications “will collapse” in the AI era. Nadella had said that the intelligence layer that makes these SaaS platforms valuable will be controlled by AI, and this AI will control several SaaS platforms at once. As such, SaaS companies will provide little more value than having a database of information, and will see most of the value they provide move to the agentic AI layer.
NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang seems to have a different take. He believes that these SaaS platforms will create their own AI agents, and these AI agents will likely collaborate between each other to deliver business outcomes. As such, SaaS platforms’ AI agents will act somewhat like APIs, allowing SaaS platforms themselves to keep most of the business value.
It’s hard to say which future will end up coming true. Microsoft runs an operating system, so it could want to be the AI layer that controls different SaaS applications, and could see a future in which it ends up capturing most of the value. NVIDIA, though, likely wants AI systems to be used by as many companies as possible, so seems to be pitching a future in which SaaS companies all build their own AI agents and they collectively end up talking to the user-facing AI layer. It remains to be seen how the future plays out, but we seem to be in the Great Game era of AI, in which moves taken today could lead to enormous advantages down the road for companies and businesses.