Independent Analysis: AI, SaaS, and Revenue Growth Strategy

A few months ago, I needed the cheapest possible flight to Hyderabad with one hard constraint: total journey time—including layovers—could not exceed 25 hours. Normally this is a 30-minute war: Kayak, Skyscanner, Google Flights, maybe Skiplagged, then the airline sites themselves—cross-checking durations, hidden fees, visa transit rules, the usual dance. Instead I opened a chat window and wrote one sentence to an LLM. Thirty seconds later I had four viable options, prices, exact durations, departure times—even which ones had working USB ports in economy (because the agent apparently knows I care). I picked one, paid (still had to jump to the travel-card site—one remaining friction point), calendar event created, boarding pass on the way. I never visited a single airline website. I never even saw an ad. That small act felt like crossing an invisible border into the website-less world. Websites aren’t going away, of course. They’re simply retreating backstage, becoming pure data reservoi...

While the spotlight remains on consumer-facing features - voice, images, personality—the enterprise AI landscape has quietly undergone a fundamental realignment. Recent surveys of technical leaders show Anthropic has emerged as the primary LLM provider for 32 % of enterprises (vs. OpenAI’s 25 %), capturing an even more dominant 42 % share in developer and agentic workflows.   This shift reflects deeper structural forces:   Anthropic’s revenue is ~80 % enterprise-derived, creating strong alignment with the demands of production-grade reliability and steerability.   Strategic capital from Google and Amazon Web Services, combined with Claude’s availability as the leading non-Microsoft model on Azure, has accelerated its deployment across the major cloud platforms.   Microsoft itself is actively diversifying its AI stack, expanding in-house model development (Phi series, MAI-1 efforts) and deepening partnerships beyond its original OpenAI investment—...

  Based on research from Seer Interactive (Authors: Nick Haigler, Garman Chan) and InfoTech Research Group Stop Celebrating Vanity Traffic. Start Tracking Intent. We’ve spent the last two years obsessing over a terrifying headline: "AI is stealing your traffic with zero-click answers!" Honestly, we were looking at the wrong number. Digital leaders need to stop focusing on the low volume of AI traffic and start celebrating its insane quality . If your team is still celebrating a massive spike in organic traffic from Google, let's be real: most of that traffic is low-intent noise. The non-obvious business consequence of AI is that it has become the world’s most efficient lead pre-qualification engine , funneling only the most high-intent users directly to your conversion page. This changes everything about content strategy. The Conversion Shock: 16% vs. 1.8% A recent case study from Seer Interactive, pointed out by my friend  Christian Ward of Yext , provide...

Dateline: November 20, 2025 Just when you thought cybersecurity couldn't get more complex, Palo Alto Networks (PANW) drops another bombshell. Following their April acquisition of Protect AI (securing AI models) and July's whopping $25 billion buy of CyberArk (identity security for AI), PANW just announced a $3.35 billion deal for Chronosphere, a next-gen observability leader. If you were wondering about the strategic thread connecting these dots, it's crystal clear: Palo Alto Networks is building the Unified Data and Security Foundation for Autonomous AI Agents. The "Agentic AI" Problem For years, cybersecurity was about protecting human-driven systems and traditional applications. But in 2025, we're deep into the "surging AI cycle" where autonomous AI agents are not just processing data; they're acting independently, making decisions, and performing tasks across our digital environments. This changes everything. Traditional security and observab...

The Real Cost of "Busy Work" in Your Industry If you run a lumber yard, a construction firm, or a warehouse, your day is a high-cost grind of looking up order numbers, hunting for delivery receipts, and retraining staff who walked out last week. This isn't strategic work—it's expensive, time-consuming "busy work." We hear endless hype about general-purpose AI, but for business owners, the question is simple:  Can it make me money right now by solving my specific operational nightmares? The recent Epicor Insights event in Washington DC area (Nov 19 - 21) signaled a definitive answer: Yes, it can, but only if you use it with surgical precision. Epicor’s new "Cognitive ERP" strategy isn't about being the biggest; it's about being the most precise tool for driving immediate profitability in your vertical. The Digital Employee Powered by Trustworthy Data Epicor stated that they were smart enough to get their conversational AI agent,  Prism , to...

Sierra Hits $100M ARR: When AI Agents Stop Being Demos  AI agents could be parlor tricks. They impress in presentations, crash in production, or get abandoned after a pilot. They seem to exist to make board decks look good, not to actually save money. Sierra proved something different. On November 21, 2025, just 21 months after launching, the AI customer service company announced $100 million in annual recurring revenue. The achievement surprised even its co-founders Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, who said it happened "a heck of a lot quicker than we expected." This isn't about hitting a number. It's about something much bigger: enterprises actually trusting AI to do real work. Source: Sierra blog and TechCrunch , November 21, 2025 The Shock Is Who's Buying Sierra's customer roster includes tech companies like Discord, Ramp, Rivian, and SoFi. But the real eye-opener was adoption by century-old businesses: Next (founded ...

  Katie O'Neil's Closing Keynote on the "Meaning" Strategy in the Age of AI Dateline: MarketingProfs 2025 Conference After days filled with sessions on marketing operations, storytelling, and creativity, the MarketingProfs conference closed with a powerful keynote that aimed to unify these disparate elements. Katie O'Neil took the stage to challenge attendees with a critical perspective: the real work of AI in marketing isn't about generating more content, but generating more meaning.   O'Neil argued that whether marketers are dealing with AI dashboards, content governance, buyer journeys, or culture, these disciplines all form a ring around what things actually mean for people.  She positioned the meaning as a unifying force, asserting that AI, content, and measurement only matter if they signify something meaningful. In her view, "meaning isn't just an accessory to your strategy. Meaning is the strategy".   The Cautionary Tale of Scaling Wi...

Workday acquires Pipedream (Nov 19, 2025) to operationalize its AI capabilities. The acquisition solves the "last mile" problem in enterprise AI: the inability to act on insights. Historically, Workday agents were siloed, capable of reading internal data but unable to touch external systems. Pipedream’s integration layer (3,000+ connectors) changes the value proposition entirely, transforming Workday agents into a "nervous system" capable of reading, writing, and executing tasks across the entire disparate enterprise tech stack (Slack, Jira, etc.) rather than just reporting on it. Source: Workday press release , November 19, 2025 The Gap They're Filling Workday manages HR and finance for 11,000 organizations. They have deep data about organizations, approval chains, spend policies, who reports to whom. That's valuable context for AI agents. But that data lives only in Workday. Meanwhile, actual work happens everywhere...

We've Lost Faith in Text. It's an AI Problem. We’ve all seen the headline: more Americans prefer watching the news over reading or listening. Sure, you can chalk it up to short attention spans, but honestly, that’s lazy analysis. The deeper signal, the one every C-suite leader needs to obsess over, is this: digital trust is rapidly shifting from the writen word to visual context and immediacy.** Why? Because of the age we live in. Generative AI has utterly commoditized text. It’s cheap, it's fast, and it’s everywhere. When text is so easily and cheaply produced, consumers instinctively place lower trust in pure text as a source of truth. Your ten-page policy PDF now carries less perceived authenticity than a 30-second product demo video . This isn’t a preference shift; it’s a trust crisis. The Business Consequence of Commoditized Text If your digital strategy is still anchored in lengthy articles and detailed copywriting, you’re losing the battle for retention and comp...

Artificial intelligence (AI) has been lauded as the next great frontier for B2B marketing, promising a leap in efficiency, personalization, and customer acquisition. While the potential is clear, the journey to smarter marketing is often "Easier Said Than Done," demanding a strategic shift in process, technology, and organizational alignment. I presented a session on this topic as the Principal Research Director at Info-Tech Research Group at the MarketingProfs B2B Forum on Tuesday, November 18 2025 . With over two decades of experience, I spoke about the transformative power of AI and the key challenges marketing leaders must overcome. The Power of AI in B2B Marketing In my session, I discussed how AI fundamentally changes how we engage prospects and customers, moving from broad, manual efforts to highly targeted, automated, and data-driven strategies. Enhanced Efficiency and Productivity: AI automates repetitive tasks like data analysis, customer segmentation, and pers...

DealHub Bought Subskribe So Your Next Deal Doesn't Fall Apart at Billing Imagine closing a major deal with perfect terms, then watching revenue recognition fail, billing errors accumulate, and your customer support team scramble for a month.  It happens constantly because companies use separate tools for selling, billing, and accounting. Quote software doesn't talk to billing software, which doesn't talk to revenue recognition software.This also sours what otherwise is a win. On November 19, 2025, DealHub acquired Subskribe, combining enterprise-grade CPQ (Configure, Price, Quote) with Subskribe's subscription management, consumption metering, and billing platform. DealHub is known for its enterprise-grade CPQ, contract lifecycle management (CLM), and digital deal rooms. Subskribe specialized in agile subscription management, usage-based billing, and automated revenue recognition for complex monetization models. The problem that needs such consolidation  Co...

 Content Problem that affects everyone Let's be real: you’ve spent a fortune on Adobe licenses to make beautiful, personalized content. It looks amazing. It tells your brand story perfectly. But if a customer asks a question to ChatGPT, Gemini, or Perplexity—a question your content *should* answer—how does your brand show up? More often than not, it doesn’t, or worse, the LLM hallucinates a competitor’s answer. That's the problem. You can spend $50,000 making the perfect digital experience, only for 90% of your audience to skip your website entirely and get their answer from an AI chatbot instead. You've become invisible in the new discovery engine. Adobe Closes the Content Loop with Semrush Adobe dominates content creation and customer experience orchestration. Semrush dominates discoverability, specifically SEO. They don't compete; they complete each other. This acquisition is about building a full-stack content machine. Think of it as filling the massive gap that exi...

  Image: Google AI Mode Search for the Mughal Empire in 3 Pro Thinking Mode When Models Became Brands: Google's Gemini 3 Gambit There was a time when the models powering our software were just implementation details. Companies built them, deployed them, and users barely noticed which one they were using. Technology geeks obsessed over specs, but for everyone else, the business value wasn't clear, just technical prowess without context. November 22, 2022 changed that. OpenAI turned ChatGPT into a household name, and suddenly we're living through a war of marketing messaging where new model releases get treated like product launches. The power of these models is now celebrated publicly, not just in research papers. Today, three top leaders at Alphabet/Google— Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis, and Koray Kavukcuoglu —announced Gemini 3. Data scientists are excited. Platforms are racing to offer it, some claiming they had it available "like yesterday." And unlike past ...