IT leaders are under pressure to both deliver and evidence business value. With productivity remaining a key operational focus, improving user experience is often a first port of call. The rise of AI makes the potential gains for both user and business even greater.
To this end, AI-enabled business SaaS apps can seem like the obvious answer – easy to deploy with slick user interfaces (UI), they are pointed solutions made to meet common business challenges. Credit card activation and next-to-zero onboarding means they’re easy for teams to adopt without official oversight, contributing to the growing risk of shadow IT across many organisations.
But organisations have been defaulting to off‑the‑shelf business SaaS apps – not because they were perfect, but because they were the quickest and most convenient option available. Now, the rise of agentic and tailored AI platforms offers a genuine alternative, one that can be shaped far more precisely around a company’s operational needs.
The void that business SaaS apps have filled
The gap that AI-enabled SaaS apps have filled is often aligned particular workflows – one example could be candidate screening for the HR team. In these instances, they offer quick wins that add early value and boost productivity or take the heat off a particular team.
But there are limitations, as we’ll explain through the lens of a commonplace use case.
Responding to requests for proposal (RFPs) is one of the most common use cases for a business SaaS app with embedded AI. A typically standardised process, RFPs represent the kind of repeatable and admin-intensive workflow that is primed for automation and AI.
RFP SaaS apps boast extensive capabilities, especially for high-level subscription plans. Sometimes, a level of customisation is possible but this will be tightly controlled and will only go so far. To capture the full AI capabilities of the app, businesses must adapt workflows around the operation of the tool, rather than using it to support the way they want to work. Inevitably, there is lots of functionality many businesses don’t or can’t take advantage of, meaning they’re paying for bells and whistles they don’t actually need.
Critically, SaaS apps like those for RFPs also exist in their own data universe – siloed away from your wider IT environment. Without integrations or API connections (which can bring additional costs beyond licencing) the application is limited to only leveraging the information available in this universe, which adds sharing considerations and a need for general housekeeping to ensure data is available to the app. Initially, this may feel like a modest overhead, but further down the line data freshness becomes an issue which erodes usefulness and trust in the output. Of course, with a new data silo comes data sovereignty, protection and compliance requirements as well.
As a result, when it comes to genuinely harnessing AI in the workflows important to your business, looking to custom deployments is increasingly a better answer than off-the-shelf SaaS.
Custom AI and the rise of agentic solutions
It’s now possible to build custom, agentic AI solutions that offer powerful capabilities and align more closely with how your business actually works. These systems can be tailored to follow established business processes, interpret and act on data, and support human users with their day-to-day.
Again, let’s take the RFP use case as the example. Rather than operating in a silo, an RFP Agent co-exists close to the data and applications that your business relies on. This opens the door to huge flexibility in terms of what it can do, the information it can harness and the relevance and context of its outputs. It means the RFPs it generates are built using the latest data, are always current and can be generated from the same place your users do the rest of their work.
Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Azure are brilliant foundations for tailorable agents – enabling solutions to be built inside your tenant and in close proximity to everything that’s important.
And from a security perspective, it’s easy to align with security and compliance regimes to ensure sensitive information isn’t accidentally surfaced. Embedding agents in this way also minimises the risk of shadow IT, as it becomes easier for users to onboard and adopt the tools they’re given rather than seeking out new solutions as the result of dissatisfaction.
Tailorable agent builds without the heavy lifting
It’s easy to assume that creating an AI agent demands far more time and resource than deploying a typical SaaS tool, yet that’s not necessarily the case. Foundational agents can be created for common workflows, with baseline functionality that serves as a foundation for customisation and fine tuning to create a more uniquely scoped agent designed around your specific processes.
This is something we have focused on heavily at Advania. Our AI experts have created tailorable AI agents around many internal and customer processes, including RFPs. These have delivered some pretty incredible results, with one customer reporting a saving of over 400 person days per year thanks to the standardisation and automation of its RFP process.
Through the projects we’ve delivered, we’ve developed transferable learnings, patterns, and components that accelerate the creation of new agentic AI solutions. Built natively within Microsoft 365 and Azure, these agents live inside the tools that already form the bedrock of your organisation. Around 80% of the core functionality is ready to go, while the remaining 20% can be finely tailored to your specific processes – offering a level of customisation that traditional SaaS tools can’t match.
Discover the power of agentic AI
AI agents offer a valuable opportunity for organisations to rationalise their SaaS estates and properly dial‑in on the benefits of AI – retaining the applications that deliver meaningful outcomes, while moving other functions in‑house through a customised agentic solution.
If you’d like to find out more about our portfolio of ready-made AI agents our experts would love to talk more with you. Get in touch today to get the conversation started.
