[DigitalToday reporter Chi-gyu Hwang] "Keep SaaS strengths, but ditch the SaaS playbook."

Shane Hegde (셰인 헤그데), co-founder and CEO of creative asset management platform Air, stressed that point in a recent post on social media X, formerly Twitter, as he shared his experience of changing a company with AI.

Air supports creative work such as organizing photos, approving videos and sharing content with agencies in one place.

According to Hegde, Air grew more than 50 percent early this year and had what he described as solid customer retention, but board member Jared Sleeper told him it was "a so-so SaaS category."

Hegde said he also envied AI startups such as AI video startup Higgsfield that were growing quickly on the back of the latest technology.

Air’s situation was different, he said. He said it was not easy to achieve rapid growth when targeting creators who find organizing a hassle. AI changed the game. He said it seemed possible to build a service where AI handles organization and the more data is gathered in one place, the more AI can do.

Air also deployed automatic metadata enrichment, facial recognition, semantic search, Canvas, more than 50 generative models and AI agents. Results fell short of expectations. Looking back, Hegde said it was "still trapped in the SaaS way."

He was not saying companies should discard SaaS strengths. He said the benefits still hold, including predictable growth as customers are less likely to leave and contract sizes expand the more they use the product. Even so, he made clear that the way of operating must change.

He said, "In the AI-native era, what matters is only how steadily and how much more customers actually use it. Customers need to use it daily like a habit for it to be a product that can survive in the market."

Air also changed three things. The first was its core metric. Instead of monthly new annual recurring revenue, it adopted Action Credit Units, or ACU, as its core metric. It charges a value each time a customer uses an AI function. Deductions by function were set to match the value customers feel.

All departments, from marketing and sales to customer management, are measured by ACU. Hegde said a graph of the previous day’s ACU is posted to an internal channel at 9 a.m. every day, and all employees start the day by checking it. The second change was customers. Air did not make usage-based billing optional for its more than 3,000 customers. For customers signing new contracts or renewing, it set a baseline amount of AI usage and decided to charge extra fees if they exceed it. It is similar to a mobile data plan.

Customer success managers were changed to field deployment engineers, and evaluation criteria also shifted. In the past, the goal was renewals and expanding contract size, but now the focus is on getting customers to actually use AI functions more.

The third change was culture. Air eliminated a process in which development began only after planning and design were completed, and introduced a culture where engineers build first. Decision-making authority was also pushed to the field. A smaller product organization now releases 12 times more product improvements each month than before.

The results showed up in the numbers. ACU rose 15-fold over the past 5 months. Usage in the past 48 hours exceeded the total for September, and in October it expects an increase of at least 4 times from the previous month. Over the past year, the growth rate doubled and new ARR rose threefold.

Hegde said, "The world is changing too fast to have room to make long plans. Now my way is to set only the goal, not interfere, and let the team run as much as it wants."