How AI Is Going To Affect SaaS Companies?

AI technology is taking over the world. But not too long ago AI was just a new trend no one was thinking it can have a significant impact on the technological world. But as we can see, AI is achieving more and more success in big industries such as Space Exploration, And big companies like Amazon, Google, and Apple are already taking benefits of this technology.

The best examples that I can give you are, The revolutionary chatbot system, AI robotics, And AI-Driven Recomendatioon System which Amazon is already using.

As AI is taking over the industries, SaaS companies are also going to be affected by it. Mainly exports are predicting that AI can affect SaaS pricing models. Because customers are going to use their own AI systems and it is estimated that around 50% of the SaaS companies will change their pricing model by 2025 or they would be out of business.

But overall AI isn’t a bad thing. It can help us a lot if we take the advantages that this technology can bring us. As we can see Google started in 1998 and is still the world’s most used search engine, even AI couldn’t affect their business because they have adopted the new technology and they learned how to take advantage of it.

Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Visa, and many more companies are at their best just because of AI. That’s why small and medium-sized businesses are demanding market experts to talk about this revolutionary thing.

The Current SaaS Market

According to the Gartner, SaaS industry has grown 6.3% in 2020 making around $260b in the year. And the growth will continue but at a slow pace. SaaS companies are generally known as slow-growing companies. But the good thing is it will grow more and more (at least till the near future).

Here is a list of the most famous SaaS companies, reported by BMC Blogs:

And take a look at the revenue growth report 2018, reported by SRG-Research:

The Challenges And Benefits Of AI For SaaS Industry

1- Automation

A big change that is brought to us by AI is automation tools. Companies can now eliminate the extra and time-consuming tasks by using machine learning. Chatbots that help customers and users to find information and get an answer to the question is just the beginning of the automation.

Chatbots that can recommend customers a product, refer them a knowledge base link, and even advanced chatbots can analyze feedbacks and can learn about specific customer behavior when interacting with them.

What benefits can companies get from this advantage? It can reduce the cost of hiring human labor.

One of the main problems of any SaaS company is to keep their customers engaged. They can hire people who could be always ready for any type of customer support. This can cost a lot of money. Instead, the company owners can take the advantage of AI bots to get the job done.

Sales

According to statistics, a sales team spends about 20% of their time closing leads, while they spend qualifying potential leads 80% of their time. Because in the process, a lot of research needs to be done to better understand which leads are going to convert in sales and which leads aren’t. You can imagine how crazy this process is.

Fortunately, The process of qualifying potential leads becomes much easier if we use AI technology. The AI can process a massive amount of data saving weeks and months of human labor. Making it easier for a sales team to only focus on closing deals. Therefore, the productivity of the sales team could increase dramatically generating more sales for the company.

Marketing

AI-driven virtual assistants can help a lot in the process of marketing, collecting consumer data and behavior patterns can save weeks of marketing and retargeting process. It could be a win-win feature. Because the accurate data can help marketers to reach out to potential buyers and also it can help consumers to reach out to the perfect product.

Better Personalization

AI can bring the options of personalization and hyper-personalization for SaaS companies. The natural language processing and the AI’s ability to interact and learn the user behavior can help companies to provide better, faster, easier, and more personalized user interfaces to the users so that they can feel comfortable using the software.

This process doesn’t just mean better personalization, because this process can bring new features and functions which makes it more complex. But AI not just helps companies to bring new features it also can help consumers to adopt new features easily.

Conclusion

AI is no wonder a Godsend gift for SaaS companies. Advantages like machine learning can give computers the ability to perform tasks that otherwise takes too much time and energy. resulting in minimizing the costs of the development process and increasing the overall productivity.

But all these advantages come with difficulties, SaaS company owners have to understand that these advantages will come with challenges and if they don’t adopt this revolutionary technology then probably this would be the main reason why their competitors outperform them.

Artificial Intelligence has futuristic opportunities that can help companies to scale their businesses. That’s why I always recommend companies to use these technologies. AI isn’t just a solution for SaaS but it’s the Future of SaaS companies.