Carpentry, CapEx, and disruption - Salesforce CDO Joe Inzerillo on the real impact of AI on SaaS providers

The so-called ‘SaaSpocalypse’ theory and its supposedly disruptive impact of AI on traditional software firm business models have not been far beneath the surface of conversations this week at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom conference in San Francisco.

But this is not our first rodeo as the enterprise sector, Joe Inzerillo, Chief Digital Officer at Salesforce, reminded the event, saying of the disruptive nature of emerging tech:

The way I think about it is I'm old enough that I've lived through these technological revolutions. Back in the '90s, when you wanted to run a computer program, you went to a very specific computer and clicked a very specific binary and did a very specific thing. And then [Marc Benioff] and Salesforce were the ones who invented, [the idea that] oh, no, no, no, you could just do that SaaS, it could be in the cloud. And ...