AI 'Business Agents' Will Kill SaaS by 2030, Says Microsoft (thenewstack.io) 122
Traditional business applications will become the mainframes of the 2030s - functioning but obsolete systems replaced by AI agents, predicts Microsoft corporate vice president Charles Lamanna. AI agents featuring generative AI interfaces, goal-oriented processing, and vector databases will supplant today's form-driven, workflow-based enterprise software within five years, said Lamanna, who leads Microsoft's business applications and platforms division.
The executive projects industry patterns for agent-based systems will solidify within 6-18 months. Microsoft MVP Rocky Lhotka called the 2030 timeline "very forward-looking and optimistic," noting that capital-intensive industries cannot readily replace existing infrastructure with virtual agents.
The executive projects industry patterns for agent-based systems will solidify within 6-18 months. Microsoft MVP Rocky Lhotka called the 2030 timeline "very forward-looking and optimistic," noting that capital-intensive industries cannot readily replace existing infrastructure with virtual agents.
Good? (Score:2)
I avoid SaaS whenever possible. Have been burned too many times.
Re:Good? [Solution of what problem?] (Score:2)
Vacuous Subject but you raise a good point. Care to provide a more specific anecdote?
I think I saw the start of this hype, but I'm not sure the hype is gone yet. Now is the time for all good AIs to come to the aid of their SaaS? I see the fundamental general problem of SaaS as trying to find a usable level of abstraction. So far the real world has been persistently uncooperative.
Re:Good? [Solution of what problem?] (Score:5, Interesting)
Put your data into a SaaS application, then try and pull it out like a year or two later when the company makes bad changes, increases their price by 20% for no reason, has terrible support, API restrictions and/or requirements that only they can code for it... etc.
There are so many reasons its better to hold your own data and control your own API/control interactions over it without controls imposed by a company.
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Better for whom? Hello!?, what about the shareholders?
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What about financial reporting and records laws? (Score:2)
How are companies going to prove that they have financial data and accounting processes which meet federal law and regulations?
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is this a joke?
Re:Good? [Solution of what problem?] (Score:5, Informative)
There are tons of them.
Put your data into a SaaS application, then try and pull it out like a year or two later when the company makes bad changes, increases their price by 20% for no reason, has terrible support, API restrictions and/or requirements that only they can code for it... etc.
There are so many reasons its better to hold your own data and control your own API/control interactions over it without controls imposed by a company.
It's an attractive idea, but reality bites.
I do Microsoft ERP systems; specifically the Dynamics range. We have customers still on the last on-prem version that was sold, Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. These people are starting to have titanic problems keeping a vintage system like this running. Not because to OS requirement, not because of database requirements, but because the world has moved on in the last 13 years. The tax solutions for this system are starting to no longer work. Integrations for systems like FedEx and UP are starting to fail because the APIs at the carrier end have advanced so much maintaining older protocols is that much harder. I've just finished mapping FedEx V20 (the current one) to the older one (V4) in the AX2012 code base, and it cost the company a packet, since FedEx depreciated V4.
Many interface technologies have gone away, and better one have appeared in the intervening time. Reporting requirements are always changing and evolving. Automatic bank transactions (eg. ACH) are evolving more and more security. Payment processors (like Braintree) are upping their security. And, security certificates in these systems are starting to expire, with no real way of updating them.
Today, no ERP system is on-prem; they are all cloud hosted. Keeping your data on-prem is a nice idea, but in reality it's almost impossible if you want to use a modern, fully featured ERP system
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No ERP system is on-prem? Well what's all this open source code on GitHub I could easily use on-prem then:
https://github.com/adempiere/a... [github.com]
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API gateway?!!!
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That works well in two situations: small databases, and massive IT companies. A lot of companies fall in the middle where they lack the capability to competently roll their own for the scale / capabilities they need.
In those cases continuing to use / maintain their own starts becoming very costly, often more so than any SaaS vendor price rise.
Re: Good? [Solution of what problem?] (Score:2)
> I see the fundamental general problem of SaaS as trying to find a usable level of abstraction.
> So far the real world has been persistently uncooperative.
I don't see that problem. Plenty of SaaS companies have hit the sweet spot. I know of Salespeople who quit one employer and fully expect to also use Salesforce at the second employer. Ditto for ServiceNow and Ariba.com. Their abstractions work well enough to resonate with lots of customers.
Instead, the principal problem is SaaS is this : It a servi
Re: Good? [Solution of what problem?] (Score:5, Interesting)
As soon as you've integrated all of your systems into it, the vendor knows it will be costly for you to switch, so they jack up the price.
I work for one of those companies who, whenever a vendor does this, we often just write our own. It's kind of funny telling the occasional sales derp who asks "who do you use for X?" simply "we built an in-house solution for that" even if you don't have one because it doesn't leave them any room for a sales pitch. Any attempt at probing questions gets a "for security reasons, I'm not authorized to discuss that" or words to that effect.
Re: Good? [Solution of what problem?] (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Developing software sure isn't free by any stretch of the imagination. But there is also cost of running software. Software that you developed yourself, software that you licensed, SaaS, whatever...that is more often than not (much) more expensive than creating it and/or maintaining it.
Re: (Score:1)
And it's completely custom. It's like a master carpenter showing up to your home and building custom cabinetry that is perfect for just your height and reach and has all the right spots for your favorite pots and pans and dishes. It's perfect, just for you. Want a new knob? Well you made it so no problem.
Re: (Score:2)
You - "we built an in-house solution for that"
Sales derp - 'so are you satisfied with the {fill in the blank with your killer feature} and the ongoing costs? Some probing questions are not good. Some might be ok. Depends on your calendar, but you did take the call.
If that's an actual functional sales derp. Might even ask you some leading questions about things. Build a relationship, which would be a good thing for them.
Unfortunately, you do not have time for a pointless relationship if you've solved all you
Re: Good? [Solution of what problem?] (Score:2)
You - "we built an in-house solution for that"
Sales derp - 'so are you satisfied with the {fill in the blank with your killer feature} and the ongoing costs? Some probing questions are not good. Some might be ok.
Those are both what sales derps call close ended questions, leaving you with a simple answer that leaves no room for further probing: "Yes!"
Depends on your calendar, but you did take the call.
Oh no, when they cold call, usually based on information they bought from LinkedIn prior to me removing all of my information from my profile, I deny having any relationship with my employer. "I don't work for them, I don't know where you got that idea." I don't have a published work number, or any work number really, most of us don't even have desk phones -- we just do
Re: well that is ridiculous (Score:2)
There are certainly dumb "apps" out there but something like Salesforce you cannot possibly replicate in toto in house.
You mean like an ERP system? Yes, we do, actually.
SF in particular has an R&D budget of $5 billion a year.
That's nice, but Salesforce needs to accommodate a much wider range of businesses and business models than we do. They also need to operate in the cloud and solve scaling as well as numerous other problems that aren't even relevant to us.
Re: well that is ridiculous (Score:2)
Well narcc, we only have to scale to our own needs, we don't have to scale to Google, Cisco, and a number of other companies that got hit with the same data breach that yours did, and mine did not. There's your 5 billion of r&d at work, enjoy it.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
The vendor for our point of sale/inventory package has been pushing hosted servers for years now. We finally decided to get a quote from them. The difference between our current (platinum level) support contract and the annual fees for the hosted server was more than the cost of the in-house server software (which cost more than my car, and lasts at least five years).
The correct sequence is to sucker the customer in with a cheap introductory offer, then jack the prices up, not the other way around. (Instead
Re:Good? [Solution of what problem?] (Score:5, Funny)
Vacuous Subject
YOU are a vacuous subject.
God, damn it. You take a perfect excuse for a "your mom" joke and ruin it. You should be ashamed.
Re: (Score:3)
Problem being that the imagined replacement is still all the badness of SaaS, subscription model with shifting capabilities and content. Just without the traditional UI, and instead having a chat-style interface.
Mid-90s just called... (Score:5, Funny)
4GL products/languages ("low-code", table-driven programming, ... of the time) will kill developer's job and let any business analyst doing the job by moving/connecting boxes/lines/...
Re:Mid-90s just called... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: Mid-90s just called... (Score:2)
A.I. is the latest digital snake oil, promising that you can eliminate all those pesky employees who are constantly demanding to be paid for the work they do, so that all of your company's revenue can go to you, the CEO, who so rightly deserves it.
If it can really turn it into a one-man job, then there's no need for a company, let alone a CEO.
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I have a little security camera with night vision and motion detection sensors but according to marketing speak it has advanced "a.i.".
PMSL AI powered electric toothbrush. [oralb.co.uk]
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There's not been full penetration yet otherwise there would be a burger meal with AI in the title.
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There's not been full penetration yet...
That's hot!
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There's not been full penetration yet otherwise there would be a burger meal with AI in the title.
Checkers uses some sort of AI agent to handle drive-through orders. Close enough.
The 60s just called... (Score:4, Interesting)
COBOL is so easy to understand that no business will have to hire software developers ever again.
Re: (Score:2)
ALTER and repeat
and does "Microsoft corporate vice president Charles Lamanna" really believe what he's spouting? He seems to be around 35 years old (although he looks a lot younger) so this foolishness is going to be an albatross around his neck for a long time.
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Or until he's replaced by AI :-)
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Re: (Score:2)
FORTRAN seems to become more popular again in 2025
The 80s also just called... (Score:2)
The thing is it kind of worked (Score:3)
And I can tell you right now that when I started my career some 20 years ago we had desktop applications that required five times as much support as the web-based ones.
It is still finicky as hell to do layouts in HTML although it's much easier now because you can have an AI do a lot of it. But it's a fraction of the support cost
Oh and one more thing (Score:3)
Society excited by cottage private an it esteems. Fully begin on by wound an. Girl rich in do up
Re: (Score:2)
The nonsense above is for the AI llm trying to train itself on my posts.
For a second there I thought you'd adapted Redact to post on Slashdot.
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We all know Detroit is a burnt out hellscape but we blame that on China and not the massive amounts of automation.
I'm guessing you missed this Superbowl commercial from a few years back. [youtube.com]
Most people know The Motor City's story. It was originally where the big three (GM, Ford, and Chrysler) built their vehicles, which resulted in an economic boom from the resulting manufacturing jobs. Automation and outsourced production significantly reduced the need for workers over time (as well as some poor decisions made during the fuel crisis of the 70s, which allowed Japanese imports to gain a strong foothold in the US market),
Re:The thing is it kind of worked (Score:4)
Re: (Score:2)
Also don't forget how Microsoft made the same prediction about personal computers replacing mainframes in the 90s, and yet mainframes are still with us.
Microsoft is pretty big on making predictions that never happen.
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Yup. I remember going to an IBM seminar around 1994 or 1995 where they demonstrated a new IDE environment that was going to end traditional programming. They gave a demo of writing some sort of simple application with input, with a library of GUI windows connected via some sort of flow chart. At the time I thought "Fuck me, I'm out of a job", but I never really saw the product again (for some reason I think it used Smalltalk, but it has been thirty years) and when I started using visual tools, it definitely
A prediction that will age like milk. (Score:5, Informative)
At the end of the day there are still legal and contractual needs for things to be manually entered and recorded, and attested to, that last line of the form or the check box that says "I certify the above to true and correct to the best of my knowledge."
Conversations with a human or a machine just don't lend themselves to that stuff. Its why fax machines persisted for so long because 'e-mail' wasn't legally certain. Still isn't in some corners.
Business, medical records, professional documents, permits, etc, are not going to be managed with some voice conversation or even a free form text chat with an AI; because nobody is going to accept responsibility for the machine getting it wrong when their are lives or a lot of dollars on the line.
SaaS makes sense for a lot of the above needs, in terms of technology delivery, and 'traditional' web apps also fit these needs really well. In many ways they are 21st century carbon paper, we use them for the same reasons. "Agents" are not going to replace that.
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If we use your email vs fax machine analogy, SaaS sales will continue to grow through the end of 2026, and then drop by 60% by 2030 and be at 5% of current spending by 2040. That would represent how fax machine spending continued after the Internet entered the public domain in 1993.
I'm pretty sure if 90-95% of the SaaS market is wiped out over the next 10-15 years, that would align well with the predictions made in this article. Anyone hoping SaaS sticks around better hope the continued use of fax machines
Re: (Score:2)
I might say the opposite in that even old tech once it's entrenched into business practices is actually quite difficult to wrench out, even for superior solutions.
To your fax analogy those numbers are true but as an example Japan who used the fax extensively is still on a two-decade-plus mission to reduce their usage but it persists to this day.
https://www.aljazeera.com/econ... [aljazeera.com]
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Granted you are not wrong about the trajectory of fax; but my point was about the need for certainty not the technology. Fax was a legally tested media for exchanging contracts that everyone could feel confident would be treated as binding.
so people continued to use fax even when both parties had better easier solutions right at their finger tips. Finally reaching total absurdity that around 2002 I would say the majority of outbound faxes from our e-mail to fax gateway went to a fax to e-mail gateway and v
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"To the best of my knowledge" is an out unless there's a very precise definition of what you are required to know. (And if there is one, and it makes any sense at all, AIs become unusable because you can't know why they do things.)
Scary! (Score:2)
I first read "AI 'Business Agents' Will Kill SaaS by 2030, Says Microsoft" as "AI 'Business Agents' Will Kill Us by 2030, Says Microsoft" but knew, since it was Microsoft, that it wouldn't happen.
Microsoft! (Score:1)
Re:Microsoft! (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, I'm still not sold that the move from the mainframe model was the correct one.
I watched an AS/400 (technically i-series by the end) run through various platform iterations for around fifteen years before being replaced with other solutions, and in the five years I watched them struggle with those other solutions for finance, payroll, timekeeping, and other back-end business functions, that AS/400 just did those without a whole lot of fuss. Sure, it meant that users had to get in via terminal emulator and to tab-through fields to do their data entry, but those clerical staff that had the capability to learn how to do that were really goddamn fast when it came to doing data entry and records retrieval.
Every post-AS/400 solution required mousing through multiple menus and waiting for retrieval and rendering of pages. Things took ten times as long, and were arguably even worse than experiments with HTML rendering for AS/400 forms to try to bring them into the modern-ish era.
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I don't know I have seen AS400/DB2 applications sit there showing 'X-SYSTEM' at the bottom of the terminal emulator for quite some time. It was not all rosy.
They way I look at it we went
Mainframe w/time sharing with dumb terminals
Private Mainframe or Mini Computer with Micros + terminal emulators
Micro servers with Micro + fat client software (The late 80s - late 90s )
self hosted web-apps (Effectively Minicomputer + terminal emulators again )
SaaS (effectively time sharing + terminal emulators)
"Nobody cares" UNTIL (Score:3)
"Nobody cares about the mainframe - until they don't get a paycheck because it wasn't properly maintained."
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Just wait until AI payroll hallucinates that it paid the employees but instead it siphoned all the money to a Nigerian prince with a really trustworthy investment proposal.
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In one of Bruce Sterling's books set in one of those 20-minutes-in-the-future sorts of settings, there were AI phone systems that worked fine and were cheap, right up until they stopped working and then it was just easier to junk-and-replace them rather than trying to fix them.
Since AI seems to rely very heavily on 'training' off of existing content, if the unlucky scenario of training happens to coincide with a disproportionate amount of phishing attacks that seems like a sadly possible outcome.
Not far to the valley of despair in the hype cycle (Score:5, Insightful)
These kind of predictions won't age well.
BTW mainframes are still around.
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That is why they use mainframes as their example. It implies SaaS will stick around and will be used for some of the most sensitive computing with the highest reliability needs (like mainframes today), but will be mostly irrelevant (or at least unseen) to most people working in the office. It also would mean that about 5-10% of IT spending would go to SaaS while the rest would go to the "Business Agents."
That is of course if their predictions hold water.
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These kind of predictions won't age well.
BTW mainframes are still around.
You missed the point. Maintframes are still around but they don't define the day to day operations of computing. These kinds of predictions are made to frame future software products. Sometimes they work out well, sometimes they don't. There's a reason virtually no one sells / maintains mainframes anymore and everyone uses SaaS instead. SaaS won't disappear either, but it won't be a major future moneymaker for the industry - at least that is the prediction.
Personally I think he's right about the content but
Audit (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: Audit (Score:2)
It will give you a made-up answer with confidence too.
Sarbanes-Oxley Act (Score:3)
Are you, as a CEO, going to sign off on some tax return bullshit that an AI cooked up? Because AIs aren't responsible for anything. Sentence an AI to death and someone will just dig up the backup copy. And they know that.
So if this happens (Score:4, Interesting)
That's because AI is a technology that inherently consolidates.
AI is really just llms or large language models. These require massive amounts of training data from real human beings.
Right now there is a gold rush to pull training data from the internet using web crawlers.
But we can already see two major problems.
First a lot of websites are just blocking the web crawlers. Some of them are getting around those blocks but before long they will face lawsuits and the way anti-hacking laws work they're going to lose those lawsuits.
Second the websites that aren't locking down are being filled with AI slop. Making them completely useless for training.
What this means is the only people who are going to be able to get reliable and effective training data are platform holders. Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
They're the only ones who are going to be able to run the code needed to determine who is and isn't an AI slop bot. Because they control the platform and they can run whatever code they want on it. So they can do user behavior analytics to detect bots in a way that nobody else can
This means before much longer you're going to have two or three dominant players and everybody else goes tits up or gets bought out. Mix in a little antitrust violations and it won't take much time at all.
So the entire software business is going to consolidate to those two or three players and everyone else gets cut out.
If you have been doing consulting or something like it you're just going to be out of a job and there isn't going to be any jobs for you. You are also going to be competing with people half your age for work.
The really old ones will retire. And maybe you'll die before you run out of your savings (or more to the point before the banks find a way to drain them out of you).
Everybody else is just fucked eight ways from Sunday.
The only actual solution to these problems is the transition from a competitive economy to a cooperative one but fat chance of that happening.
The war cry against it is always the same. Who's going to pay for it? As soon as the thought of somebody having an okay life and not punching the clock 40 to 60 hours a week comes up everybody starts being crabs in a bucket.
What I suspect is going to happen is we're going to end up with roving bands of bandits like what's going on in Russia right now outside of the two major cities. Eventually they'll be a draft and a big war because we're going to need to invade other countries in order to fill our coffers like any failing empire.
And before long it's going to turn nuclear because we're going to hand the launch codes to absolute religious theocratic lunatics.
All because we are Petty as fuck and can't stand the idea that somebody else has it better than we do but isn't higher up on the totem pole.
And that ladies and gentlemen is the solution to the Fermi paradox.
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Or people will download a popular model and run that in their own hardware. Which, so long as they remain "open source", will be a lower cost solution than it saying a company to use their instance of a model.
With what training data? (Score:2)
You can download all you want if you don't have the training data the model is useless.
Re: So if this happens (Score:2)
That's because AI is a technology that inherently consolidates.
AI is really just llms or large language models. These require massive amounts of training data from real human beings.
No, AI on its own doesn't really mean anything.
But Just like an LLM based AI, you hallucinated this response to the prompt, and the longer your post went, the more it turned into bullshit.
In this context it means large language models (Score:1)
Basically microsoft, Google and Facebook. Nobody else will have access to the training data needed to make the models work.
Re: In this context it means large language models (Score:1)
The obvious implication here being that you're like an LLM with no training data.
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As soon as the thought of somebody having an okay life and not punching the clock 40 to 60 hours a week comes up everybody starts being crabs in a bucket.
Okay, you're a literal crab in a bucket - if you help another crab escape, what's in it for you? You're still going to end up as someone's dinner if you're one of the crabs left in the bucket. Unless you're in a Disney film. [youtube.com]
It only really works if you imagine yourself to be the one sitting on your ass collecting those UBI checks. If you're the one making poop smoothies (which if you believe the YouTube shorts, "smell like money") because AI still can't pump out a septic tank, while other people are getti
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This is why mass murderers are so successful. Sure there's a few other factors like, most people don't carry guns, the shooter chooses easy-to-kill people (children), the supposed help (police) also act like crabs in a bucket but in the end, humanity is, the biggest arsehole 'wins'.
Most of history has been about ensuring the arsehole wins a little less. But like the Amish ignoring technology, modern America ignores modern political thought: That government must care for the working-class. The very tho
So the idea with the crabs in the bucket (Score:2)
The crabs did escape code for example tipped the bucket over.
But you are correct the infighting between the people who still work and the people who have absolutely nothing to do in society is going to Doom us as a species.
We will be left with tens of millions of people who just don't have any place in society or any useful work to do.
The mass unemployment will culminate in a
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No, it doesn't happen. Microsoft is just marketing their own product.
One thing about AI, is that it's terrible at keeping track of transactions.
Never believe predictions (Score:2)
Especially when the prediction is made by someone with a financial or political motive
Predictions are hard, especially about the future, which is becoming increasingly unpredictable
Too Abstract For My Comprehension (Score:3)
Their vision is too abstract for my comprehension. I don't understand how they see it working.
The best that I can understand is that they plan to replace structured data, both collection and dissemination, with natural language AI agents. So data in dramatically more chaos than a C-Tree database? And this data chaos will be good how/why?
I can only see where it will be good for those that charge to store and process the ballooning chaotic data. But, the output on my screen or the spoken output, as Microsoft says the next Windows will do, doesn't seem to be of an advantage to me or my business.
I'd love for someone smarter than me to draw me a picture of what this future looks like.
Can AI reports become verifiable and accurate? (Score:2)
What??? (Score:4, Insightful)
Using the example of CRM systems, Campbell asked: “If you have an LLM [large language model] with access to your [Microsoft] Teams and email interactions with customers, isn’t it able to effectively act as the CRM on demand?”
No, it's not! Email and Teams don't contain all of the information you need as a business on your customers and suppliers. Those are also very dynamic sources of data. What happens when data retention policies kick in and those old emails are purged? When users leave, do I just archive their inbox forever now? What happens when there is an email chain with changing data (say, pricing for example) in that chain? Or worse multiple chains? Then there is the processing power to surface that info via a LLM from these dispersed sources constantly throughout the day for millions of users, which would be exponentially higher than just querying a database where all that info already lives.
Same with order processing, HR/benefits/payroll apps, inventory management, tax and accounting systems, logistics systems, EMRs, etc.
I'm not saying AI doesn't have a place. Being able to quickly answer questions based on that data or multiple sources of data (say CRM and sales systems) is great. Tagging emails and attaching pertinent info to a CRM entry for a customer, awesome. But completely replacing core business software? No, it just doesn't make any sense.
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And again, I'm not saying LLMs don't have a
So Microsoft is working to kill its own business (Score:2)
Good! Considering the mess they'll probably make of whatever their next effort will be, I'm all for it.
\o/ (Score:1)
I can predict the future or at least am prepared to pretend I can, to influence our stock price.
Power tools didn't make the hammer obsolete (Score:2)
Why would someone need an AI agent to monitor deterministic data in a stable, reliable manner that can be tracked through time ?
Ai Agents are great for all sorts of stuff, but I can't see how they could beat a good old dashboard when you want to track your mains KPIs.
Screws are great, but houses are still held up with nails because of their sheer strength. AI Agents are just a shiny very powerful new tool in our toolbox, not the entire toolbox. AI's lane is not to flip switches of add compute taxes on a bil
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I mostly agree with what you said, but
Little nitpick - houses are held together with nails because they are good enough and are cheaper than screws (slightly in manufacturing costs, and hugely in time spent during construction). Screws would be a lot better, and also make dismantling sections a bit easier.
That analogy is telling... (Score:2)
RNG (Score:2)
I don't think you should trust your business into something that literally use an RNG function to function.
Well I'd say SaaS companies are killing SaaS (Score:2)
When you can update and/or raise prices arbitrarily while being an important part of many businesses, there is no rational reason to not exploit the users as far as possible. You can "enshittify" your product and/or raise prices a lot.
This might be like Google, which is killing itself by making their search product worse and worse.
It's easy to predict tech 8-10 years from now, but (Score:2)
...you're never right, and no one will remember or care. Except that one quote from Bill Gates about RAM, that we all remember but only use as an example of how wrong Microsoft often is.
Also, isn't cloud computing basically just remote mainframes? MS is trying to get everyone to start running Windows in a terminal server model again, just over the internet instead of from your company's basement.
Techno babble garbage (Score:3)
Charles Lamanna, obsolete by 2030 (Score:2)
SaaS - always has and always will be a scam (Score:2)
Hosted SaaS always has been and always will be a scam. On-prem, self provided web services are fine. I bend over backwards to avoid putting anything in hosted cloud services and it has worked well. In my current company, which is a huge fast food franchise, we were given approval to do our own thing. In 7 years we have saved over $6.4 million by doing everything in house.
Office dead in 5 years, rofl. (Score:1)
SQL was supposed to be dead 20 years ago (Score:2)
It was supposed to be replaced by data cubes and NoSQL and data lakes. But guess what, SQL is still alive and well. It turns out that data cubes and NoSQL and data lakes aren't very good at managing transactions, which is what SQL is great at. So now all these types of databases living peacefully together.
AI will find some great niches to fill, but it won't replace traditional business apps.
AI is terrible at tracking transactions (Score:2)
Why would we suppose that AI could replace accounting software, or eCommerce software, or 100 other types of software? Sure, it may find niches where it can augment these classic tools, but they won't go away.
Can I have my 640KB back please? (Score:2)
Microsoft predictions are just wishful thinking about where Microsoft would like the market to go to sell their mediocre solutions.
SaaS == Lock in, AI == Data Loss (Score:2)
SaaS
- For at least the big tech bro companies SaaS is all about them owning your data. Almost impossible to pull it out. The cost of doing so exceeds the ever rising cost of maintaining the service. Over time you ability to even govern your data is eroded as well.
AI
- Well huge risks here. You data isn't even remotely stored in formats that you are used to. The AI model is effectively hardwired to your data over time. If the AI model is replaced or enhanced or what have you and poof. You data can easil
Magical thinking is way too easy (Score:2)
I think the hype is interesting albeit inconsistent. If AI is going to replace everything and everyone why should I or anyone else waste their time entertaining the limitations and quirks of the current "state of the art"?
In a few years I'll just instruct the AI to make me a trillionaire and just sit back and relax while it "does the needful". My only problem will be locating suitable places to store all the pallets of cash in my floating castle.
The end of "people"? (Score:2)
According to Microsoft, that just leaves the Microsoft Azure stack standing alone. Sometimes chaotic stupidity is what it takes to survive.
Oh good (Score:2)
Isn't it still "aaS" ? (Score:2)
Isn't the AI system still provided "as a Service" ? Or are they saying we're going to host the AI system in-house? SaaS isn't going away, just changing from the forms-based model to the AI agent model.. whatever that really means.
How are you going to get rids of forms in a business? I mean, data needs to be collected, organized and stored/retrieved. I guess I don't get how the magical AI Agent is going to work.
-m
Claims who? (Score:2)
Microsoft 365
Dynamics 365
Power Platform
Microsoft Fabric
Microsoft Copilot
Sounds more like fanciful wishing.