No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups
00:20:00 · Jake Stauch
[00:20:00] S0: Yep. So when we deploy these software engineers, I think what's really important is we actually never build custom features. We don't build bespoke product capabilities, and luckily for our category, no one asks us to. Everything that people ask for is something that every other customer is going to want at some point. Maybe they impact the prioritization, but it's still something we've always wanted in the platform. Now because it is a cogen platform on the hood, what you build in Serval is very, unique. So the password reset workflow for one company is gonna be very different, shockingly, than the password reset for another. Same with onboarding and offboarding and all these different automations internally, they look very different, but that's just baked into the core primitives of the platform. Serval almost becomes the IDE, right, for the IT department and other departments to build their automations and manage them at scale. So what we do do is if we look and we see the same customer building the same automations over and over and over again, and having to customize them and and build them in the product in the same way, we start to consider, hey, should that be a first class feature in the product? So one example is we saw a lot of customers building workflows to detect knowledge based articles that were out... Conflicting or out of date. Mhmm. And so we said, hey. We should just do that automatically. And we we had customers that, you know, would would set up automations to reclaim old licenses. So licenses for software you're paying for that no one is using, let's automatically cancel those subscriptions. Well, we just decided to build that on the platform. So it is a way for us to kind of test the waters of what should be really first class features versus what should stay as automations in Serval.
00:21:32 · Sarah Guo
[00:21:32] S2: Our enterprise customers as it relates to just general spend on code generation for software teams have gone through a journey this year. Right? They're like, we're gonna let people try it, then we're gonna token max, and we're gonna, like, restrict that and figure out who's actually doing this productively. How do you think that reflects for your your business, and how do you think about the sort of actual intelligence cost?
00:21:53 · Jake Stauch
[00:21:53] S0: Yeah. I think we're still watching this. I do see our CIO customers trying to pull back from that initial token maxing era, but I also think we're so early in the adoption curve that it's not going to be a a clampdown in the aggregate. It's actually gonna continue to be a pretty dramatic rise because most companies are still figuring this out for the first time. And they're... They are all going to go through this cycle of rapid early adoption and then kind of a pullback of spend and trying to measure and calculate ROI. But what I hear from our our customers all the time is not really a concern about the long term budget impacts. They they realize that there's gonna be a short term pullback, but they're still planning on increasing spend. What they need though is more proof of ROI, and that I think is what's gonna transform in the industry is is people looking for how can I prove that this spend is giving me something, and that is hard? I don't know that anyone's really figured out how to measure what you're getting from the tokens that you're buying, but that I think is gonna be a huge opportunity for us to show the work that's being done and try to equate it to work that would have been done in other platforms or with other cost models or by labor. And so that's what our customer asked for, is help me prove that this was worth it. And and that's what the assignment is. That's what we have to do. We we try to price on workflows run because I think it's a better reflection of actual work being done versus just tokens, which is more like verbosity and inefficiency. But but I think we're all gonna figure out different models of proving that what we're doing makes sense.
00:23:22 · Elad Gil, Jake Stauch
[00:23:22] S1: One of the things people have been talking about is this sort of sesspocalypse where the idea is, know, people will just build their internal SaaS software, and all these categories will go away. And a lot of people, to your point on calculating the ROI and tokens, are trying to sort, is it worth rebuilding these systems? And can you actually do that effectively? What is your view on the SaaSpocalypse, or this shift in SaaS versus I [00:23:44] S0: think all the companies I've talked to that tried to vibe code these tools internally, especially the the main system record tools, not the the kind of point solutions. But the main system record tools have discovered that it's quite expensive to build and maintain enterprise software. Even if you can do it, it doesn't make economic sense in many cases to do it unless your needs are very bespoke and unique in some way. And so buying off the shelf for things that are not your core competency, I think, has always been the build versus buy argument. I think that that is is true now as it is, as it... As it's ever been, because it still is hard to build enterprise software. A lot a lot of companies are discovering this or relearning this, that actually enterprise software is complex, and you need people to maintain [00:24:21] S1: Use cases and edge cases.
00:24:21 · Elad Gil, Jake Stauch
[00:24:21] S1: Use cases and edge cases. [00:24:23] S0: Edge cases. Yeah. Thing... Things that break down, and people need update, so then you have to staff the team, and then you're paying for that labor, and and then no one really wants to work on the internal tools team in many cases. So you have all these problems with doing that. Where I do see it is in kind of the point solutions, where a lot of companies have hundreds and hundreds of SaaS applications. They probably need a couple dozen [00:24:43] S1: Mhmm. [00:24:43] S0: Full. And so I do think you're gonna have a shrinking of the the sprawl of different point solutions, and they're gonna be eaten by the core systems of record and the core platforms. [00:24:51] S1: All the middleware too, think, is just gonna go Exactly. Exactly. [00:24:54] S0: So I think there is gonna be consolidation. And so this will be a SaaS apocalypse, but in that kind of point solution, smaller market cap type companies, I don't think that you're gonna truly get away from the courses of records, the ERP, the HRIS, the ITSM, the CRM. I think those are going to stick around. They might transform, and what we're seeing with Serval is is we are displacing the... Those tools. So I think there will be a new generation of incumbents, but I don't see those categories just disappearing.
00:24:54 · Jake Stauch, Sarah Guo
[00:24:54] S0: So I think there is gonna be consolidation. And so this will be a SaaS apocalypse, but in that kind of point solution, smaller market cap type companies, I don't think that you're gonna truly get away from the courses of records, the ERP, the HRIS, the ITSM, the CRM. I think those are going to stick around. They might transform, and what we're seeing with Serval is is we are displacing the... Those tools. So I think there will be a new generation of incumbents, but I don't see those categories just disappearing. [00:25:22] S2: I'm curious as to what mental model, or what theory of mind do you have for the IT user given... You know, they're not software engineers, but they understand their business. They understand what they're trying to go automate. Is it... You know, when you talk about Vibe coding, I'm like, okay. But do you understand, like, security architecture? Like, do you understand how this is gonna integrate with governance? Like, how do you square, you know, code generation and how we think about vibe coding and what the challenges are with that with... You know, we wanna build robust IT systems. [00:25:55] S0: Yeah. Absolutely. Think IT is really interesting because they're they're closer to a software engineer that I think a lot of people give them credit for. [00:26:01] S2: Mhmm.