The Four Keys to Surviving the SaaSpocalypse

To survive a zombie apocalypse, you’d probably want to team up with people who are skilled at medicine, engineering, farming—and your prepper uncle who stockpiles beans. To survive a SaaSpocalpyse, who should you team up with?

Suppose for a second that the most extreme version of software disruption comes to pass: a couple years from now, AI coding agents have gotten so good that anyone with a computer has high quality and cheap software on tap. OpenAI and Anthropic are providing plenty of apps themselves for a range of professional functions, taking advantage of their cutting-edge models and access to powerful AI chips. Developers direct their agents to contribute to open source projects, leading to a proliferation of low-cost alternatives to legacy software products. These new sources of competition drive profit margins for most software businesses down to zero.

Making matters worse for legacy software-as-a-service providers is that, in this scenario, most of their users are themselves AI agents, which have learned to use enterprise apps more efficiently than humans. That could make lucrative seat-based pricing all but obsolete and require software companies to rely on pricing based on usage or “outcomes,” such as completing a task. To the extent that human users are interacting with enterprise apps at all, they now expect AI to customize the user interface according to their individual preferences, meaning a nice user interface is no longer enough to differentiate a software product.