Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang argues it’s the “most illogical thing in the world” to believe AI will kill SaaS, and says the markets “got it wrong” in sending SaaS stocks tumbling. Why “illogical”? Because, as analyst Benedict Evans stresses, the fact that everyone can now easily spin up code actually doesn’t solve any SaaS problems, because creating code and tools is the easy part: “The hard part is knowing that you need a tool for this in the first place and then knowing what the tool should do.”
If that’s true, then what Shopify is doing with Sidekick is potentially revolutionary by embracing and extending the traditional SaaS model.
In December, Shopify introduced custom app generation through Sidekick. A merchant (Shopify customer) describes a tool, and Sidekick writes the code, using Shopify’s interface components and connecting to its Admin API. It’s a cool option and has been very popular. Shopify says merchants created almost 4,000 custom apps in the first three weeks following the release.
This isn’t surprising: Shopify is delivering the customization customers have long wanted from enterprise SaaS while ensuring they still enjoy the comfort of ongoing support and platform stability.
