That's not the threat model. The threat model is that they won't have to - at some point which may not be right now. End users want to get their work done, not learn UIs and new products. If they can get their analysis/reports based on excels which are already on SharePoint (or wherever), they'd want just that. You can already see this happening.
It's an ugly truth product owners never wanted to hear, and are now being forced to: nobody wants software products or services. No one really wants another Widgetify of DoodlyD.oo.io or another basic software tool packaged into bespoke UI and trying to make itself a command center of work in their entire domain. All those products and services are just standing between the user and the thing the user actually wants. The promise of AI agents for end-users is that of having a personal secretary, that deals with all the product UI/UX bullshit so the user doesn't have to, ultimately turning these products into tool calls.
Think about all the cycles this will save. The CEO codes his own dashboards. The OP has a point.
For purposes of this thread, if chat AI becomes the primary business interface, then every service behind that becomes much easier to replace.
And if you build an AI interface to your product, you can make it not work in subtly the right ways that direct more money towards you. You can take advertising money to make the AI recommend certain products. You can make it give completely wrong answers to your competitors.
This sounds like a vibe coding side project. And I'm sorry, but whatever he builds will most likely become tech debt that has to be rewritten at some point.
I have also seen multiple similar use cases where non-technical users build internal tools and dashboards on top of existing data for our users (I'm building UI Bakery). This approach might feel a bit risky for some developers, but it reduces the number of iterations non-technical users need with developers to achieve what they want.
I keep hearing this and seeing people buying more Widgetify of DoodlyD.oo.io. I think this is more of a defensive sales tactic and cope for SaaS losing market share.
Focus on the simple iteration loop of "why is it so hard to understand things about our product?" maybe you cant fix it all today but climb that hill more instead of make your CEO spend some sleepless nights on a thing that you could probably build in 1/10th the time.
If you want to be a successful startup saas sw eng then engaging with the current and common business cases and being able to predict the standard cache of problems they're going to want solved turns you from "a guy" to "the guy".
We built an AI-powered chat interface as an alternative to a fully featured search UI for a product database and it has been one of the most popular features of 2025.
once the Csuite builds their own dashboards, they quickly decide what they actually need versus what is a nice to have.
"It" being "that it's harder than it looks"?
If corporate decisions could be made purely from the data recorded then you don't need people to make those decisions. The reason you often do is that a lot of the critical information for decision making is brought in to the meeting out-of-band in people's heads.
Honestly, I'm not sure what to expect. There are clearly things he can't do (e.g. to make it work in prod, it needs to be in our environment, etc. etc.) but I wouldn't be at all surprised if he makes great headway. When he first asked me about it, I started typing out all the reasons it was a bad idea - and then I paused and thought, you know, I'm not here to put barriers in his path.
--
[0] - Or Claude, or Gemini.
Once you've abstracted away the UI (and the training on how to use it) it will be a lot easier to just swap one SaaS for another.
In a world where the interface is "you talk to the computer" you will be able to swap providers way more easily.