From specialized software to generalist software

What stroke me about AutoGPT when it came out was how generalist it was. And this is really what made LLMs blow up in April 2023. It felt like they could do anything.

So far we've built software in a very fragmented but focused manner. And it led to great improvements in productivity. But I think the next step is to try to see what are the similiarities between all the best SaaS that have been produced the last decade.

I think once we start unifying SaaS and build "everything apps", we will get closer to the essence of what fascinated us with AutoGPT: something that can do everything. Initially, I thought the only way to build this THING was to connect many existing SaaS. But I was wrong: this THING is a tool AND a tool user. It owns its tooling AND uses its tooling.

YES, focusing on one area can lead to great outcomes.

But the type of outcome you get when you take the essence of all the best SaaS and unifies them into one is just on another level.

The best AI use cases will emerge from a holistic view of our data. And Salesforce knows it because of how much they invest in Data Cloud. Unfortunately, it's not enough to view this data. You need to build an action layer on top of it. And when you have 20 tools/APIs, good luck building reliable actions.

So we need to start merging the best tools into one cohesive app. We all need to start doing it. Because it will produce more success for our customers.

Do you really want 20 specialized AI in your 20 different tools? How are they going to make sense as a whole? Also, if you train one, how do you train the others as well?

How do you know the vendor you picked to train your AI customer support is using the same data type as the vendor you picked for your Sales Intelligence workflows? You're going to suffer if you don't start thinking now about the vendors you use to run your business.

Or maybe you won't. Maybe Data Cloud will save you. Or a unified API. Or whatever "glue" you will use.

I am just not buying it: how can we expect 20 different companies to magically offer us a cohesive experience for us to automate our business with AI holistically?

They might be great at their vertical, but there is too much friction when integrating them.

Before we had gen AI, I think it was fine because everything was rule-based.

But I promise you, once you start building AI workflows and you want them to be very relevant, you're going to be in pain if you have to integrate EVEN 3 tools together.

Paradoxically, the path to disrupting software with AI is to rebuild software first. Rebuilding one cohesive app that has all the building blocks needed to build any business software. And then build AI workflows on this app.

This is going to hard and take a lot of time. But it compounds over time. And one day you wake up and your business is running in autopilot in one single app.

You didn't build software. You didn't build AI

You built a self-running business.