Are chatbots in SaaS apps dead?
Chat is communication method, not a product. You can’t define “AI” or “bots” as chat. SaaS companies should think of shipping AI in two categories:
1. Autonomous: AI as a separate entity from the human
2. Assistant: AI as an extension of the human
Autonomy: these are essentially background agents that go in loops. You can think of them as doing stuff recursively, kicking off on set triggers or (ideally) events it detects itself. The holy grail here is a background agents that can wake itself up to things you care about, make evaluations and drive its own loop for a long time with proper and only necessary context, execute, iterate, and ask for your input/notify you when it’s done. Key here is that the agent owns its own loop. Claws work really well here to help orchestrate and coordinate for subtasks with personality.
Assistants: these are multi turn agents, that start reactively and triggers are defined at each turn. They tend to execute much more scoped tasks, but can still go off and explore and move recursively within a defined upfront instruction input. You play fetch with your assistant.
The goal of autonomy is catch things you wouldn’t have caught, to be always-on, and to act as an independent colleague. The goal of assistants is to be your superpower, to help you run your defined workflows, and to execute on your commands. The easiest mode of communication for both is chat. Artifacts are helpful to digest both loops and turns.
Our Assistant (Bits) is in Preview. And our next evolution of Autonomy is coming very soon…
We’ve launched Bits Assistant to help customers search and act across Datadog to resolve issues faster. Few examples below on how we see customers use it.