‘If you are not adapting to AI, throw away your roadmap’: Freshworks’ Girish Mathrubootham

SaaS companies should look at creating a new roadmap with the emergence of artificial intelligence, says Girish Mathrubootham, Founder of Freshworks. 

Speaking at the keynote session at SaaSBoomi 2025 held in Chennai, Mathrubootham advised founders to "throw away" older roadmaps that only focus on building workflows for humans.

“If you look at all the SaaS systems that have been built till now, they are built for an old world. It is built assuming that humans are going to operate the system. It's built in a world where only structured data made sense — a lot of this is going to change, if you can't reimagine how a new system will be built for AI agents and humans coexisting. So that creates a massive opportunity...,” said Mathrubootham. 

"If you are still following your old SaaS roadmap, where you are building workflows for humans only, it’s time to throw it away and start reimagining your company as a Day One company."

He added that India’s dream of becoming a “product nation” was first fueled by SaaS and is now accelerated by AI. 

“AI is an even bigger opportunity for India. What brought all of us together at SaasBoomi was the dream of India as a product nation. If that is the mission, SaaS is the first catalyst and AI is an accelerator,” he said. 

Mathrubootham described AI as both exciting and scary—while it disrupts various industries, it simultaneously disrupts traditional SaaS businesses as well. 

"I would go back to what Jeff Bezos said: ‘Today is Day One of your company.’ If you are not adapting to AI, throw away your roadmap. If you have an opportunity to go after agentic [solutions], where you are going after the Salary TAM (Total Addressable Market), do it today,” he said. 

Mathrubootham further stated that there’s a huge potential in companies developing vertical AI SaaS solutions, such as building specialised AI agents for specific verticals, which may scale significantly in the future.