alt Hacker News> unless your company has an unassailable moat
Is not working in SV enough of a moat?
> If other companies are able to tolerate larger amounts of tech debt while shipping new features faster then you'll be out of a job at some point when your company loses market share.
I'm saying that B2B services are very common outside of SV and more focused on stability, compliance, long-term maintenance, and the operational knowhow that comes with all that rather than just shipping new features. It's not that there isn't some competition, but that the business is built on much more comprehensive partnerships than just being a software vendor. I can't believe I'm saying this, but "synergy" sometimes isn't just a meaningless buzzword.
When you try to jam "AI" into the mix, the disruption harms the business value. Many including myself would like to be enlightened if you think otherwise.
Replies
Economics are economics. If your company is inefficient by not using AI, then it must make up for it and sacrifice some other economic advantage it has over its competitors to break even. If the loss of efficiency is low enough for your particular business, then perhaps you do not care and are content with sacrificing N% of your economic advantage over your competitors.
Well, I'm commenting from a place of bias, as I'm Head of AI at our company and am in charge of rolling out agentic coding throughout the engineering org. So, bear with me a bit.
We're B2B SaaS in the Ed Tech space. It's very sales-driven. There's only so many players in the space, customers come with a laundry list of things they've seen others do and expect you to have those features, too. There are basic expectations that need to be met, some of those are compliance, but, sadly, a lot of what actually drives sales is just... flashy shit that looks good to those signing the checks not those using the underlying software. We lost a sale recently because someone was upset we didn't have the ability to give digital stickers to children - seriously.
You're more than welcome to tell the customer they're wrong and not give them their stickers. Or you can ask Claude to build stickers for you in two days and keep up with the Joneses.
Don't get me wrong. Customers aren't retained long-term with flashy shit. People churn out because of poor UX, security fears, pricing hikes, etc. Those frustrations tend to build over years and pain has to get pretty high because it's effortful to shift software providers. But, for getting new customers, sales is driven by flashy features and, at least in our experience, we need to be able to build those as quickly as our competitors or we lose out.