Josh Pantone, CEO of Boosted AI, argues that AI will soon generate UIs and apps on demand, cutting software costs by 80-90%. He points to Bloomberg Terminal's 5,000-10,000-line screens as mostly auto-generatable within months, and expects OpenAI and Anthropic to offer turnkey code generation by year's end.
Chapters
There's no question that AI is disrupting markets and will only continue to do so at an accelerating pace. Josh Pantone, co-founder and CEO of Boosted AI, has a big prediction here, which is that SaaS is dead. He believes that user interfaces and small applications are just going to auto-generate in the future. And this whole notion of SaaS, not as a business model, but more as like a database that you have to do work in to get value out of, is going to be disrupted and go away where software does work for you. Let's listen to what Josh has to say.
Did I say a few years? That was way too conservative. It's happening now, like, like, by end of this year. Yeah. Um, it's interesting. I mean, you're starting to see this a little bit with like Replit and Lovable and some of the other products like that. But fundamentally, uh, where, where we kind of see the world going, um, it's going to get like 80 to 90% cheaper to produce code. You're going to increasingly see these agentic systems that can kind of generate code on the fly. It's going to mean the cost of software is going to go down to zero. And I think fundamentally the kinds of SaaS products that we're used to, um, are either going to change or just go away. Um, I'm obviously highly focused in my industry. So if we just for a second there, think about finance, what is the biggest player in finance right now? It's the Bloomberg terminal. What is the Bloomberg Terminal? It's 15,000 screens that have all been hand-coded, specific frontend and a specific backend. Mm, these screens are probably using anywhere between 5,000 to 10,000, uh, lines of code on average. Um, collectively across all of them, it's billions of lines of code. But already with the technology we're building, I think about 20 to 30% of those screens can basically be hand-generated on the fly as the user wants it. I think honestly, in the next 3 months, We'll be able to do about 80 to 90% of it. Um, and you know, by year end, you're, you're, you're talking like the majority of the terminal. And I think it'll be quite obviously a better experience because, uh, with the terminal, you have to learn the exact screen. You have to learn the UI. It's this thing that's been around since like the '80s. Our systems like ours will be able to generate the screen you care about. It'll learn who you are as a personality, figure out what you care about, generate on the fly. And it'll be an intuitive experience because it'll all be the exact same thing. You wouldn't even think about it. You just kind of show up and there'll be a UI with whatever you want generated. Um, and so today you're starting to see that technology applied, you know, for the product managers or for the engineers. There aren't too many that are like going out to the end users yet, but it's really, really close. Like literally, I think in the next few months. Um, and, and, and by the way, I'm describing what's going to happen in our system. I don't think it's very long before you start seeing OpenAI and Anthropic and systems like that basically generating software on the fly for everyone. Again, they already do it a little bit, right? If I go into Anthropic, it'll generate a little piece of code, it'll generate a little UI. They create those cool little artifacts. Give it a few more months. And I suspect all of those are going to generate whatever code you care about whenever you want, and just host it. And yeah, I see that basically consuming the entire software ecosystem in some way, shape, or form. Again, there will be all kinds of like little cool things that'll come out of it. But I fundamentally agree SaaS in the form that it existed before is dead. And, um, we almost see it kind of going in a different direction, uh, service as a software, um, totally, totally different from what came before.
That is truly fascinating. I think, I don't know what the aggregate market cap even of just publicly traded SaaS companies is, but it's, it's in the trillions. So like, uh, they better figure this stuff out. That's really, really fascinating.
Yeah, some are, by the way. There's definitely some that are being really intuitive and ahead, but I think mostly it's going to be startups disrupting incumbents because startups could just move so much faster.
You know, I had Tobi from Shopify on the podcast last year and a couple of things come to mind. One was, you know, you talked about how much you just love playing with technology and Tobi told me like, there's days where I wish I was still just a CTO. It's just like, the thing that he loves so much. And then I had Glenn Coates on the podcast recently. I had helped Glenn sell his business to Shopify and now he leads product for Shopify Plus. And he told me that Toby is just spending inordinate amounts of time in AI. You know, any new model comes out, he's figured it out, and then he's like the very next day, hey, why haven't we implemented this? So I, I guess that's just what a SaaS CEO needs to do these days is become very, very intimately familiar with AI and figure out how to disrupt themselves.
I actually, against the advice of many people, uh, started coding one week a quarter.
Oh, amazing.
Primarily to understand what was possible. Um, and then in some cases to build prototypes to sort of show my team what was possible. Um, I, yeah, I, I think it it must be very challenging being a non-technical CEO navigating the environment right now because the pace of change is so high. And like I said, when things are moving as quickly exponentially as they are, when they're accelerating as fast as they are, a single quarter misstep can fundamentally ruin your business.
Hey, thanks for listening to the Startup CEO Show. If you'd like to connect with me, be sure to visit my website at markmacleod.me or follow me on LinkedIn at The Mark MacLeod. Or Twitter @MarkMacLeod_. And if you want to tune in again next week, be sure to subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts. We'll see you next time.
