Friends don’t let friends build data centers these days. Cloud infrastructure has eliminated on-premises bulk for companies moving into the digital age.

Now, anyone building a software as a service application has a new palette of easy, featherweight tools before them. Cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services Inc. are allowing them to easily tack on complex technologies such as machine learning and artificial intelligence.

The coming wave of SaaS apps mirrors the mobile-application rush, according to Jerry Chen (pictured), partner at Greylock Partners. “You’re going to see distribution in the cloud making it easy to get your apps out there,” Chen said. “You’re going to see a bunch of new markets open up.”

Chen spoke with John Furrier and Dave Vellante, co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the AWS re:Invent conference this past week in Las Vegas. They discussed how the ease of building AI-powered apps will impact developers and vertical markets. 

Will ready-made Legos replace custom code?

The onslaught of new SaaS apps will disrupt verticals such as healthcare, financial, services and construction, according to Chen. “Autodesk just bought [construction software startup] PlanGrid for $800 million,” he said. “I mean, that’s unheard of.”

Powering the new applications are not just cloud compute, storage and networking, but a potent AI layer on top. AWS is trying to corner the instant-app market with new services around AI and machine learning. These include Amazon SageMaker suite for accelerated app development using machine learning, machine learning tools for image recognition and the like.

Amazon is placing AI building blocks for modern apps conveniently at the app layer itself, Chen pointed out. It is basically doing to the application-infrastructure layer what it has done to the cloud-infrastructure layer by deconstructing the services. “You now have a simple [application program interface] to basically build these modern AI-powered apps,” Chen said.

It has the potential to change the developer persona and democratize app development. AWS and many others such as Google Cloud Platform want to provide the best set of machine learning and AI Legos. It will be fascinating to see how that battle plays out and what new forms app development takes on, according to Chen.

“In the future, can you build a SaaS application entirely on Amazon, Azure or Google without any custom code?” he asked.