Going All-In on Chatbots: My Bold Bet on Redefining SaaS UI for the Future

For those of you that don't know me, I have been a builder all my life. As a founder, I have always looked for that perfect way to execute on a wild vision that I thought the world deserved.

Early 2023, I founded a deep tech company called Sphera Networks, which is a neural network that is trained to know what online marketing is and how to connect people with products. This is to address the impending problem of large marketers having to work in a data-less environment.

After bringing in the perfect investors and a truly world class team we sat down to lay out the framework for what we needed to build. This is when I declared that this platform will have minimal user interfaces (UI) and will be driven by chat only.

Despite the strong objections, and their was a lot of very strong objections, I explained why this was the direction that we had to take in order to future proof our business.

The Legacy of SaaS and the Complexity of UIs

The evolution of UI in SaaS has been a journey marked by endless innovation with a constant push towards simplicity and efficiency. When I started my first enterprise SaaS platform over a decade ago the UI's were clunky, unintuitive which was a reflection on the tools we had to build at the time.

As the internet became more sophisticated there was a marked response from clients who were often spending tens of thousands of dollars a month to use our technology. They expected cleaner, more user friendly designs that reflected how they worked. And as this era saw the introduction of technologies like AJAX which allowed for dynamic interactions a true paradigm shift occurred. This shift was not just about technology, it was a reflection on user preferences towards more intuitive and faster interactions.

All great, right? No! The problem for users is that whilst we can do more in the browser now, the tasks required to be done by machines have become for more complicated and the work flows often involve multiple tasks with different types of outputs required and somehow these all need to be connected together in a way that makes sense.

But these highly advanced processes and workflows are incredibly subjective and vary not just from industry segment, customer size or sophistication, but on a person to person basis. This is when all intuitiveness is lost.

Added to this, the fact that industries, especially trillion dollar industries such as marketing are constantly in a state of flux. With technologies, approaches, abilities all changing and having to be incorporated into an already existing structure.

We are, in the end, left with legacy systems, that are a confusing amalgamation of how we used to work, how we want to work and how some ket clients dictated we should work with some compromises thrown in along the way on the whims of product managers (usually executive level!).

Advanced marketing systems now take several months to properly learn.

For me, I spent way too much of my life debating (rather heatedly I might add) flows of systems, user expectations, time frames for development and opinionated versus unopinionated.

Imagine a world in which you could fling all of that away and create the ultimate system that meets every users needs.

Enter Chatbots: The Game-Changers in SaaS UI

We all agree that AI has revolutionised the various facets of our daily lives in a dramatic way. From Alexa making our homes smarter to Netflix personalising our entertainment experience, it's only natural that our evolution in online habits paves the way to the immense value of chatbots in SaaS.

The integration of chatbots will mark a significant shift from the traditional click-based interfaces. Users will now be able to accomplish tasks thorugh simple conversations, bypassing the need to navigate through complex menus. This shift is not just about ease of use; it's about making software more accesible to a broader audience, regardless of their technical expertise.

This is a clear win from a consumer point of view, but the advantages for us tech companies are also very clear.

Business Not as Usual

With every new shift in technology we have negatives that must be mitigated before implementing it on a commercial scale. Mistakes made can result in large financial losses for you and your customers.

So lets be clear on why we should do this before we get into the dangers.

From a product and development point of view you can cut months and months of development time from researching and building the perfect interface. Previously we would sit at round tables with clients and ask them if they had one hundred dollars how would they invest it across the various elements of our system. No two customers gave the same allocation. Finding that perfect balance then testing it before it even gets to development was very, very lengthy and ultimately costly.

By cutting out this area of the product and R+D, you now have an intuitive platform that can adapt to every customer and is future-proof.

The second big advantage is that you get to intimately understand your customer and how they work, they explicitly tell you what they want. By understanding your clients ever evolving needs and expectations, you instantly have empathy pre-built into your platform.

There is no better focus group that thousand of clients telling you where you are good and where you are wrong. This opportunity to have a positive impact on the processes that your clients do daily is both exciting and transformative.

You have the potential to know what they want to know, how they want to know it, before they even ask.

Thirdly, onboarding, training and support disappear almost entirely. One of the things I used to hate in my previous companies was this need to "educate our clients". I didn't like it and whilst it was necessary from a support point of view, the concept felt almost disrespectful. Opinionated seemed like arrogance.

As part of the original discussion I had with my team in the beginning of the article my second ask after no UI, was no support section.

The benefit of having such a conversationally driven platform is that the learning curve disappears and any technical problems or questions that you may have can be perfectly addressed in a chat interface that is perfectly designed for the job!

The New Challenges that Must be Addressed

I believe that with great things, must come great hardships. But as innovators and creators we must find creative and innovative ways to overcame the obvious issues from such a way of working. It is too easy to say why things wont work. Let's find a way to make it work.

The first problems that we encounter when we look to build such a system even before technologies comes into the fray is the fundamental question which is, "how will a user know what to do, and what is even possible?".

The answer to this question must be found in changing our preconceptions of what a user experience is and the subconscious ego that goes along with that.

We need to shift from curating explicit experiences to an approach steeped in guidance and mentorship. By understanding your users and their intentions you must spend a lot of time showing them what is possible and making sure that expectations are aligned.

Expectation alignment will be the new sword that we must live and die by. You must guide and inform what is possible and what is not from a purely technical point of view. The how, is no longer any of your business.

A negative experience is asking your platform to do ten things it can't do. Every interaction is an opportunity to guide, whilst still respecting your customers time and attention.

A great example of guidance is Googles mobile app where it asks in the chat box "Did you know you can," followed by actionable pill box buttons with various tasks that are relevant to the user.

A secondary issue revolves around your new design language and what that looks like. As any successful SaaS CEO will tell you UI is the opportunity to communicate with your users in the way that you want them to see you. As interfaces become exponentially more simplified how do you differentiate your company.

In my eyes this is not a problem but one of the biggest opportunities that is immediately apparent with this shift.

People are very subjective when it comes to design.

Why don't SaaS UI designers play hie and seek? They don't have time to hide as they are busy deciding what shade of blue that the 'Hide' button should be.

With chatbots you have the opportunity as the CEO to extend yourself and talk with your customers the way you would if you were sat in the room with them. You can embed your passions, your accumen to be whatever you would like to be for your user.

As AI becomes even more advanced in the not too distant future, perhaps you even become a visual assistant that is the ambassador to your client. The opportunities are endless.

Looking Ahead: the Future of Chatbot

The future of SaaS interfaces is set to be profoundly influenced by the rate at which AI evolves. As the technologies become wore sophisticated I anticipate a shift to even more conversational, and context-aware interfaces, changing at the core how users will interact with not just software but ideas.

AI will also drive hyper-personalisation in UI/UX, adapting content and interfaces in real-time to suit individual user preferences and behaviours.

Moreover, the emergence of technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) could merge with AI to create immersive and interactive SaaS environments, offering new dimensions of user engagement. Voice-assisted interfaces are likely to become the norm, making SaaS platforms more accessible and further reducing the learning curve. The convergence of these technologies will not only enhance user experience but also unlock new capabilities in analytics, predictive modeling, and automated decision-making, paving the way for more intelligent, efficient, and user-centric SaaS solutions.

Join the conversation, Follow the Journey

I decided to write this article in part due to the fact that this is an incredibly nacent field. As I initially researched how to build and implement this tech into Sphera, information was scarily scarce. I hope that not only it can give you a better insight into this world, but I'd also love to hear your thoughts and ideas.

Have you implemented chatbots into your technology? What challenges have you faced, and what have you celebrated? Let's start a conversation and learn from each other.

Furthermore, I welcome you to join me on this exciting journey with Sphera Networks. Follow our LinkedIn page for regular updates. Or, if you are a consumer of marketing technology, you can apply for our Beta program at our website and experience our platform first hand.

Stay connected, stay informed, and let's embrace the AI-driven future of SaaS together.