From Dashboards To Decisions, AI Is Rewriting The SaaS Playbook

When a company needs a report, a feature or a small application, does it still need to buy another piece of software? AI is making it faster and cheaper to build custom applications, challenging the economics of traditional enterprise software. Companies that once relied on expensive subscriptions and off-the-shelf solutions can increasingly create tools tailored to their own needs, using the data and systems they already have.

The shift became apparent during my recent conversations with executives from three companies in Lithuania. I sat down with leaders from Lithuanian Railways Group, international payments company TransferGo and software developer Helmes to understand how they are putting AI to work in their businesses.

Their experiences revealed something more interesting than another round of productivity gains. AI is changing how companies extract value from their data, identify opportunities and decide whether they need to purchase new software at all.

At Lithuanian Railways, an executive who once searched financial reports line by line now asks AI to identify the changes worth investigating. At TransferGo, an AI system uncovered an unexpected surge in money transfers from Iceland, a market nobody had been assigned to monitor. Executives at Helmes described how companies are using AI to build applications around their own business requirements rather than relying exclusively on commercial software. Beyond Lithuania, GoDaddy is testing whether applications built with its own AI tools can replace smaller software subscriptions in its corporate offices.

Together, these conversations raise a question for the enterprise software industry. If companies can build their own AI applications and extract more value from their existing systems, how much of the software they currently pay for will they still need?

A Better Question Than Another Dashboard

“What are the changes, what are the trends,” he asks.