| Friday, 13 December 2024 |
An abridged, narrative version of the latest episode of Two by Two, The Ken’s premium weekly business podcast Subscribe here
Good morning [%first_name |Dear Reader%],
Towards the end of Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, there is an exchange between Billy Beane, coach of baseball team Oakland Athletics, and John Henry, owner of the Boston Red Sox. At one point, Henry says:
There’s a bit more to that dialogue, and I’ll come back to it in a bit, but it’s quite true, isn’t it? History has shown us that the first person to adopt a radical idea often suffers for it, and in some cases, even gets destroyed in the attempt to make it work.
India’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) sector is at a similar inflection point. Most Indian SaaS companies have, for quite a long time, used pricing strategies that required customers to buy a more expensive plan in order to unlock a new feature. The goal has always been to push you into buying more to get more.
But with AI entering the fray, solutions are going to get a lot more client-specific, and it’s going to become imperative for these same SaaS companies to start charging their clients based on outcomes. If they don’t—or even hesitate—they risk frugal, emerging AI upstarts snatching away what they’ve spent years building.
Take the case of buy-now-pay-later giant Klarna, which decided to replace its SaaS providers Salesforce and Workday with internally built AI.
But these are overseas companies. What about Indian SaaS firms that have always been quite comfortable with the conventional SaaS playbook?
That was precisely what hosts Praveen Gopal Krishnan and Rohin Dharmakumar sat down to discuss with our guests for the latest episode of the Two by Two podcast. Sumanth Raghavendra is the CEO and co-founder of Presentations.AI and one of the co-founders of The Ken. And Sidu Ponnappa is CEO and co-founder of Realfast and former managing director of Gojek India.
The result was an engrossing, insightful discussion that anyone interested in the advent of AI and what it means for businesses will not want to miss.
If you are subscribed to The Ken’s Premium plan, you can use The Ken app to listen to the episode.
If you are a free or basic subscriber, you can:
1. Subscribe to The Ken’s Premium subscription tier, then install our iOS, iPad, or Android apps. This will get you access to more than just Two by Two. You will also be able to read our longform stories, premium newsletters, and visual stories.
2. Subscribe to Two by Two on Apple Podcasts. It’s a monthly subscription, which gives you access to all of the new and previously released premium subscriber episodes.
You can also listen to the 30-minute version of this episode here if you want to get a sense of what we discussed:
SaaS can be a lot more than just a business record
Traditionally, SaaS has largely remained a system of record-keeping—a way to organise, store, and process businesses’ customer data.
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