WinAll the Data! Reporting & Analytics, and the Coming Battle for Data Gravity
Data is the next battleground between Vertical SaaS control point incumbents and their AI-powered challengers. And the fight won’t just happen in the backend—it will play out in dashboards and reports, the often-overlooked windows into a business’s health. Own the reporting layer, and you don’t just provide insights––you secure account control, creating a launchpad for expansion and cross-sells. But here’s the catch: Generative AI is changing the game. It’s making data integration effortless, normalizing disparate sources, and enabling natural language-driven analysis—no SQL sorcery or BI expertise required. If you don’t own reporting, AI will. It will start small, offering sleek, standalone reports, then quietly pull in more and more data until—surprise!—it has the most comprehensive view of your customer’s business. Classic “integrate and surround.” And once that happens, your control slips. The time to act is now—before AI gets its foot in the door.
To be fair, dashboards are nothing new. I spent a summer as a junior woodchuck MBA in the SAP Office of the Chairman. At the time, SAP was scared sh*tless about becoming the “system of ledger” in the back closet. It’s like the system of record where everything is stored and extracted, but rarely used. Over time, Hasso (SAP co-founder and then chairman) rightly worried that SAP would lose account ownership and the ability to cross-sell. Their answer? Hire IDEO to bring the UI into the 2000s (I am old) and look at buying a BI tool. My summer project involved creating many slides—which were rated substandard—to make the argument. They ended up buying Business Objects in 2007 for $6.78 billion.
Today, history is rhyming. SAP’s fear (and opportunity) in the early 2000s is now coming for VSaaS companies. This time, though, the wave isn’t cloud computing–it’s generative AI. A new wave opens new profit pools and new vectors for attack. Users can interact with your software differently through chat and voice interfaces, data previously locked up in PDFs is suddenly freed, and the opportunity is greenfield. VSaaS companies can either grow or be relegated to becoming the system of ledger that GenerativeAI applications use to pull their data from.
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