Nick Mehta

CEOs Doubt Static Processes; SaaS Must Evolve Faster

A key question in the "future of software" debate entails understanding how durable enterprise business processes will be in the future. In the old world, companies could go so far as to assume their inventory management processes, for example, would be static for a decade and then implement SAP and not materially upgrade it. Today, I'd imagine most CEOs have less confidence that their businesses will be static a decade from now than they did before. Many likely have a more short term-oriented approach - "solve my problem today." SaaS was definitely a step in this direction, cutting deployment times and improving agility. Yet, many actual enterprise SaaS implementations represent the customer's business as it was a few years ago. This is often the root of the "my CRM is broken" issue. In a world of increasing short term-ism, the question then becomes what approach is faster and more agile: 1. Buying purpose-built SaaS with AI and configuring it and hoping the vendor keeps evolving to their needs 2. Vibe coding a custom solution and then investing to keep it relevant When I look at this tradeoff, I don't see things being as obvious as others do. I could talk myself into either alternative. But what is pretty clear to me is that the world will need increasing speed and agility - perhaps forever. Whichever approach delivers that will win.