Tech Spotlight: Alex Sauer-Budge, Ph.D.

We sat down with Alex Sauer-Budge, SAVVI’s CTO & Co-Founder.  He is an MIT-trained leader and one of our many in-house PhDs, to get his perspective on the technology changes sweeping through the benefits industry and what this means for organizations and consumers. 

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The Great AI Replatforming: Why Your Business Needs to Rebuild, Not Just Retrofit

Every decade or so, a technology shift forces companies to do more than adapt, it forces them to rebuild. We went from mainframes to desktops. From desktops to the web. From on-premise software to the cloud. Each transition required companies to not just add a new feature, but to fundamentally reimagine how their products work.

AI is that next shift. And most companies are not ready for it.

It’s the great  AI replatforming, and I believe the businesses that treat it as a retrofitting exercise will be left behind by the ones that treat it as a ground-up rebuild.

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Q: What do you mean by "replatforming" — isn't adding AI just a feature update?

Not at all. When mobile arrived, the companies that just made their desktop websites "mobile-friendly" were quickly overtaken by companies that built native mobile experiences from the ground up. The same dynamic is playing out now with AI.

A genuine replatforming means rethinking who, or what, your users are. Today, your users are humans. In five years, AI agents will be interacting with your platform on behalf of humans. They'll be ingesting data, triggering workflows, and making decisions at machine speed. If your architecture is built only for human users, you'll be invisible to this new layer of the economy.

We're already seeing early signals of this with protocols like MCP (Model Context Protocol), which is essentially a new API layer designed for AI-to-AI interaction. Just as companies had to build APIs in the last replatforming era, they'll need to build AI-native interfaces in this one.

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Q: How does this change how you think about your team and organization?

Dramatically. Here's the mental model I use: every person on your team needs to be ready to work one level up on the org chart.

Think about an individual contributor, a designer, an engineer, a researcher. Today, they execute tasks. In the near future, their job will look more like what their manager does today: defining direction, setting quality standards, reviewing AI-generated output, and making judgment calls. They'll effectively be managing a team of AI agents.

That's not a threat, it's actually an enormous opportunity. But it requires deliberate investment now. You can't wait until the AI is good enough and then scramble to retrain everyone. The leaders who start preparing their teams today will have a massive advantage.

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Q: What's the risk for companies that don't act on this now?

The risk is obsolescence, gradual at first, then sudden. The capability of AI agents is advancing faster than most people realize. The length of tasks an AI agent can successfully complete has been roughly doubling every seven months. The cost of deploying these systems has dropped by an order of magnitude in just the past two years.

If you're not building AI fluency into your team and architecture today, you're accruing a debt that will be very expensive to pay back later. And unlike technical debt, this kind of organizational debt affects your ability to attract talent, serve customers, and compete on speed.

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Q: Where should a company start?

Start with your people. Encourage, genuinely encourage, not mandate, your team to experiment with AI in their actual work. Not as a novelty, but as a real part of how they do their job. Engineers should be writing code with AI assistance. Researchers should be running analyses with AI tools. The early results will be uneven, sometimes the AI will be terrible, sometimes surprisingly great. That variance is actually informative. It tells you where the opportunities are.

Then, think about your product architecture. Ask yourself: if an AI agent needed to interact with my platform, could it? What would need to change? Building toward that future doesn't require you to abandon what you have, it just requires you to build with that horizon in mind.

The Great AI Replatforming isn't a distant threat. For many industries, it's already underway. The question isn't whether it will happen, it's whether your organization will lead it or scramble to catch up.

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Let’s find the right solution for you, visit savvifi.com or connect with us at sales@savvifi.com or 781 583 7011.

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