I've always had an adverse reaction to the friction of logging in, learning a new dashboard, figuring out where someone decided to put the buttons. Over the past six months that has started to disappear from my daily life. Now I send a message from whatever surface I'm already sitting in, an LLM or a chat or a text thread, and something behind the scenes does the work and comes back to me when it has something worth saying.
A lot of the newer AI products I see are building an AI-native layer as a substrate on top of a SaaS offering, and it's lipstick on a pig. What I'm obsessed with is the version where the SaaS never shows up at all, and that's what I'm starting to build toward in my own products and in the client work, and it changes what you're actually designing.
Right now we're building a real estate acquisitions agent, and the principle behind it is that it should behave like an analyst you hired rather than software you bought. It doesn't run a deal end to end and drop a report on you when it's finished. It gates at each step the way a person would, so it pulls the listing and builds out the deal record and then comes back with what it found and what's still missing before it underwrites anything, and when the comp set is thin or the rehab number is really a guess, it says so instead of burying it in a cell somewhere. Underneath that there's a custom MCP that runs our underwriting model, pulls from third-party data sources, drives our proprietary disclosure review, and fills in a rehab budget from the known property conditions, so it can go get what it needs without anyone staging it first. None of that is what the client experiences though. What they experience is asking about a deal and getting an answer back the way they would from someone on the team.
The instinct most people still have is to reach for a portal, or an app someone has to be trained on, and my push is almost always the other direction.
The bar I hold for anything I build is that no one should need a login, a training video, or a walkthrough to get value out of it on day one, and if a client has to be taught how to use what I built them, I built the wrong thing.