Is SaaS Becoming an OS?

There is a new outlook on what software is, especially with the rise of digital-first businesses or digital-first business models. Is Software as a Service (SaaS) on the verge of being more than just a toolset, and becoming the operating system for businesses? In this interview, Sreedhar Gade, VP of Engineering at Freshworks, explains this transition, reveals how Generative AI is changing product strategy, and moving to AI-native systems and conversation interfaces. He also discusses the consolidation trend with respect to enterprise SaaS, Freshworks journey to a combined platform, and his vision for an "agentic" world that emphasizes AI governance and trust.

- Aanchal Ghatak

How is GenAI changing the way Freshworks approaches product strategy today?

What we can uniquely do is serve both SMBs and enterprises, thus giving us a larger innovation canvas. In AI, we're pulling together new forms of co-piloting, where AI helps agents by responding using the full context of the customer, with models we trained on Freshworks data to further enhance automation, and even agentic AI, where customers would work via AI agents for full resolution. Our goal is to move beyond automation to create truly intelligent self-learning systems.

In your view, is enterprise SaaS moving toward consolidation or modular expansion?

It depends on the maturity of the company. Startups tend to want best-of-breed tools that can do one thing for a use case. As businesses grow, typically they prefer unified platforms. The driver of this change is AI, and AI's ability to accelerate product development as we speak. If you think about innovations at market level, the real differentiator is ecosystem. Enterprises are drawn to platforms that unify data, integrate with other functions seamlessly and deliver intelligence across the requisite functions. For sure, consolidation will be the greater trend at enterprise level.

How do you see this evolving? Are we heading toward an AI-native enterprise SaaS era?

We're shifting from traditional software to intelligent systems. Until now, most SaaS products incorporated AI incrementally, tacked on to existing products.

The future is truly AI-native, where conversational interfaces will be the primary way to interact regardless of the product segment, allowing users to ask and get information through natural dialogue.