The Era of ‘Enterprise’ AI Agents Begins
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The enterprise software landscape is undergoing a dramatic shift. While SaaS providers continue to announce new AI-powered features, many forward-thinking companies are taking matters into their own hands. By developing in-house AI agents, they’re not just innovating—they’re slashing costs by millions, even billions, wiping out the need for expensive and outdated SaaS systems.
Case in point: Klarna.
The fintech giant recently made headlines for ending its partnership with Salesforce and Workday—two of the most dominant enterprise systems of record.?
Klarna’s approach? The company developed AI agents that could observe the inputs and outputs of these systems and eventually replicate their functions, creating a “digital twin”. Once these AI-driven replicas were functional, Klarna shut off the legacy systems, saving tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars in the process.
Industry expert Chamath Palihapitiya, in a recent episode of All-In podcast, lauded the move, and said it takes “enormous technical strength” and “tremendous executive leadership”, to do something like this. He said replacing deeply embedded enterprise software solutions like Salesforce and Workday isn’t for the faint-hearted. It demonstrates a clear shift in how companies are rethinking their tech stacks.
Agreed. Recently, Mark Zuckerberg questioned the authenticity of self-proclaimed tech companies, saying that a true tech company needs technically skilled leaders at all levels, from the CEO to the board and management team.?
“All these companies that called themselves technology companies were not really set up that way. It’s like the companies I was talking about—it’s like they, you know, the CEO wasn’t technical, the board of directors had no one technical on it, they had like one dude on the management team who was the head of engineering who was technical, and like everyone else wasn’t,” said Zuckerberg. “If that’s your team, then you’re not a technology company.”?
As more companies strive to become true technology companies, the latest advancements—particularly those developed by OpenAI, Google, Meta and other source initiatives—are making this transition easier than ever, thereby reducing reliance on traditional SaaS providers such as Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, and others.
OpenAI o1, for instance, ranks in the top 11% in competitive programming (Codeforces), stands among the top 500 students in the US in a maths competition (AIME), and surpasses human PhD-level accuracy in solving physics, biology, and chemistry problems (GPQA). There will be many more to follow, with the likes of? Google DeepMind, Anthropic and Meta, also launching advanced AI models in the coming months, taking agentic experiences to a whole new level.?
“We have these five levels of AI—the first was chatbots; the second, which we’ve just reached now, is reasoners; third is agents; the fourth is innovators, the ability to figure out new scientific information; and the fifth is full organisations,” said OpenAI chief Sam Altman, in an interview with T-Mobile president and chief executive officer Mike Sievert.?
He said the move from one (chatbot) to two (reasoners) took a while, but the latter enables level three (agents) relatively faster. “The agentic experience that we expect this technology to eventually enable—I think—will be quite impactful,” said Altman, adding that OpenAI o1 is like GPT-2 for reasoning. Developers and enterprise customers will eventually figure out ways to use it just like they did with the GPT-series of models.?
The End of Egregious Costs: The high costs of outdated enterprise systems are becoming increasingly troublesome. For example, NYC’s public college system recently paid Oracle $600 million to build a course management portal using Oracle’s PeopleSoft suite. “It’s built on top of Oracle’s PeopleSoft suite, which they refused to customise without an extra $400 million (to hit $1 billion),” said the user on X, saying that New Yorkers are left with a subpar system and continue to pay over $5 million per year just for “hosting”.??
Palihapitiya believes that such projects would be impossible in the near future, as current AI systems offer far cheaper and more efficient solutions.?
The Future of Enterprise SaaS: The days of relying on expensive, monolithic platforms may be numbered, as AI-driven solutions offer highly customised, cost-effective alternatives. While enterprise providers are working hard to deploy AI agents on a massive scale, the real revolution may be happening within companies themselves, where internal teams are developing AI solutions tailored to their exact needs.
This raises a key question for the future: Will the SaaS giants or so-called technology enablers continue to dominate, or will we see a new era of in-house AI solutions that challenge their very existence?
One thing is certain—enterprises are no longer passive consumers of off-the-shelf software. They’re becoming active creators, empowered by AI to build, adapt, and optimise their systems in ways that were unimaginable just a few years ago.
Stay tuned as AIM continues to track these seismic shifts in enterprise technology.?
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