SaaS Won't Die Overnight — But Its Center of Gravity Is Already Shifting

Listening to the latest Pivot Podcast with Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher, I heard an argument that SaaS vendors will be just fine in the age of AI. The reasoning: R&D is only a small portion of their budgets, so AI-driven efficiency gains won’t fundamentally disrupt their economics, and they will just absorb AI into their tooling.

I’m not convinced they fully see the magnitude of what’s happening.

Right now, I’m watching multi-month projects collapse into days — delivered with clean architecture, strong unit tests, and minimal rework. My teams are building ontologies on top of enterprise data that allow agents to reason, generate business insights, and automate end-to-end workflows. For some, that may sound advanced. From where I sit, it feels like we’re just getting started.

Here’s my prediction — in true Pivot fashion.

First, companies will begin to question the rigidity of SaaS pricing and packaging. Fixed SKUs and seat-based models were built for a world where humans operated software. As AI agents take on more of the work, those structures will feel increasingly constraining — and expensive.

Second, the importance of traditional SaaS UIs will decline. When agentic systems can execute workflows directly, the UI becomes less central. Humans won’t disappear, but they’ll increasingly supervise, guide, and collaborate with agents rather than click through interfaces step by step.

Third, workflows and team structures will shift dramatically. If software can reason across systems and execute tasks autonomously, you don’t need “users” in the same way you once did. The shape of work changes.

The companies that thrive in this environment won’t just buy software — they’ll build it to gain a competitive advantage. They’ll operate agentic systems at scale. The core platform focus will move toward compliance, data governance, agent governance, feedback loops, and the foundational platforms that enable all of this.

In that world, today’s SaaS platforms don’t disappear overnight. But their center of gravity changes. And the speed of that shift may surprise people.