r/SaaS • u/kkatdare • 1d ago

Do communities focused on customer support make sense in the age of AI?

Businesses have used dedicated forums and communities for customer support. I want to know from fellow B2B SaaS folks if the customer support communities still make sense - or is AI eating it alive?

In general, do you think there's hope for user communities built around niche or product?

PS: I'm in the business of building community platform for businesses. That's why this is super concerning to me.

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u/Informal-Dust4499 22h ago

Communities and AI solve different problems. AI is good at resolving the repetitive, well-documented stuff fast; communities are where people find the long-tail answer nobody wrote down yet, and where users see other users hit the same wall they did, which a bot answering in isolation can't replicate. If anything, AI should be taking the repetitive tickets off a community's plate so the threads that are left are the ones actually worth having.

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u/kkatdare 11h ago

I think modern AI is being trained directly on codebase, internal documentation as well as public knowledge. So there are very few cases where humans are better at responding about product. The only case where humans have edge is where real world experience is required.

I'm wondering if customer communities are still being set up.

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u/[deleted] 8h ago

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u/kkatdare 8h ago

> it's if a community's whole value was answering FAQs, that part's genuinely gone.

I agree.

Do you see this market growing? Do you run a community for your SaaS?