As more enterprise software platforms build agentic systems, one tech CEO is predicting the business community’s move toward AI agents is changing not only how we work, but how we develop and understand software.
Speaking from technical hiring platform HackerRank’s virtual AI DAY, CEO Vivek Ravisankar told viewers we’re living amid a technical shift, reordering how we think about what technology can do and even the essence of SaaS.
LMGTFY: SaaS, or software-as-a-service, is a cloud-based enterprise system with relevant applications accessible via the internet that a business or organization subscribes to in order to deploy.
“We all know…SaaS as ‘software-as-a-service,’” he said. “With AI, this is going to get flipped to be ‘service-as-a-software.’”
Ravisankar suggested that the same SaaS providers offering you access to use their software will soon offer you a tool that delivers outcomes.
“When you think about software, you think about it as a productivity tool that’s going to make it easier to do your job. When you think about a service, you think about it as doing your job. If you look at the modern set of products and applications coming out, you would find this to be a through line. When Salesforce launched Agentforce, this was not just a CRM 2.0. This [deployment] is effectively you hiring agents who can do the job for you.”
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With Agentforce, a platform designed for building and deploying custom autonomous AI agents inside an organization to operate with minimal human oversight, businesses can now build a “limitless workforce” using AI agents that are able to take independent actions across the workflow.
“The next generation of software is going to have AI and machine learning at its core and it’s going to increasingly look like services packaged as a software,” he said.
For HackerRank, its AI-powered software services look like a career coach for developers, an AI service that interviews applicants on behalf of your engineering team, or an AI proctor that monitors interview assessments for fairness and integrity. The company plans on gradually rolling out these services beginning in April.
HR can expect more enterprise software that will offer solutions to do work for them, shifting human workers (at least in the world of tech talent, anyhow) to conduct the orchestra of services the AI-powered software is designed to perform.
“The job of a developer becomes an orchestrator of these AI agents,” he said. “It’s going to be more of reviewing the work than doing the work.”