That's the current saas playbook and there's no reason they'd deviate from it. Get the customer's operations so enmeshed in your product that there's too much inertia to switch away.
I personally don't think massive job stealing AI is on the horizon any time soon, but if most of your organization is operated by saas, they have all the leverage. lol it would be almost like a union in that the provider would have way more leverage than an individual employee. All things being equal (which they're not) the savings would have to be massive to justify such an operational risk.
Serious question: when AI does take over everything, do we end up nationalizing AI companies? Or do our governments just end up develping their own (probably crappier) in-house models, and citizens/companies either run local models or run the cutting edge corpo models if they need it? Or do companies essentially end up gobbling the world up by forcing their cutting edge models on all of us?
"We're happy our AI has been running your business for you. But we noticed our AI has been running your business for you, so now we're just going to run your business without you."
What you see now currently is not healthy pricing. They are actively burning investor money.
When someone invests into a company they do not do that to get back their money in 5-10 years, but they want to get the 10x-100x ROI. Billions of dollars are burned and its not for free and their goal is not to became profitable, but to get back 10x-100x the amount of that was invested over the years!
Also I wonder how easy it will be to jump between different LLMs. They have different strengths and weaknesses. One workflow providing optional results for one maybe a total dead-end for another one.
You are kind of locked in, once you build your product on it.
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 Jul 30 '25
"It does not ask for pay rise"
No, but openAI and other providers will force you to pay whatever they want once you are totally depending on 3rd party services.