“SaaS is going away,” said Dave Park, co-founder and CEO of Narada AI. The company is betting big on a different future for enterprise software, one powered by agentic AI.
Change is coming “in the not-too-distant future,” Park said on Equity, TechCrunch’s flagship podcast. “The typical knowledge worker today deals with anywhere from 17 to 25 different SaaS tools and portals every day, wasting two and a half hours just manually looking up or updating these systems. We believe in a future where it’ll just be the data, the databases, and AI agents or agentic models that take your request and operate across those silos to get the job done.”
Narada AI, which made its debut at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 and is based on UC Berkeley research, has developed large action models: a spin on LLMs that can reason through and complete multi-step tasks across different work tools even when APIs are missing.
Park joined Rebecca Bellan on Equity to talk about the rise of agentic AI, what it actually is, how it differs from traditional automation, and what real-world changes enterprises need to make to deploy it at scale. The timing for the conversation is ripe: YC’s most recent batch included 70+ agentic startups, and major players like Grammarly are building full AI work stacks through partnerships and acquisitions.
Listen to the full episode to hear more about:
- What most people misunderstand about automation and who’s getting caught in the agentic hype.
- How tools like Narada could eventually help solopreneurs and smaller teams, not just the enterprise giants.
- Why the future of software might not be “using” apps at all.
Equity will be back on Friday with our weekly news rundown, so don’t miss it!
Equity is TechCrunch’s flagship podcast, produced by Theresa Loconsolo, and posts every Wednesday and Friday.
Subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts. You also can follow Equity on X and Threads, at @EquityPod.
