Your $49/Month Software Subscription Just Got Weird
You know how your company pays for like 10 different apps and everyone actually uses maybe 2 of them? Slack for memes, Notion for that one doc someone made 8 months ago, and a CRM that your sales team definitely isn't updating.
Well, all of that is about to get really awkward.
Turns out AI can now do the job of 10 people. Not "help" them. Actually replace them. Bain found a single AI agent doing sales outreach sent 1,000 emails, qualified leads, and booked meetings - the work that used to need an entire team. No CRM login required.
We're not talking about ChatGPT writing your emails faster. We're talking about the email job not existing anymore.
The Part Where the Business Model Breaks
Here's what's wild: most software companies charge per person. You pay $20/month per employee, they do the math, everybody's happy.
But what happens when companies start firing people and replacing them with AI agents that don't need a "seat"?
Salesforce already panicked and created this thing called AELA (Agentic Enterprise License Agreement). Basically "just pay us a flat fee because we can't count seats anymore lol." Per-user pricing is collapsing as companies run thousands of AI agents that don't technically work there but somehow do all the work.
The entire $197 billion SaaS industry is built on a pricing model that just... stopped making sense.
Wait, Why Do We Even Need Apps Anymore?
SaaS was supposed to be the innovation. You went from one massive Oracle system to like 50 different specialized tools. Unbundling, they called it.
Now AI is just bundling it all back together. Why would you click through 3 different apps when an AI agent can just hit all the APIs at once and do the thing in 2 seconds?
Enterprise AI adoption jumped 280% recently. Companies aren't asking "should we try AI?" anymore. They're asking "wait, are we building an AI product or just slapping GPT onto our old thing and hoping nobody notices?"
Real companies are already doing this in production:
- Intercom's AI handles customer support tickets
- Cursor is replacing traditional code editors
- ADP automated time-entry approvals
These aren't demos. This is happening right now.
The "I Could Build That in a Weekend" Problem
Here's the uncomfortable part: if your software is basically a fancy form that saves stuff to a database, you're cooked.
Because literally any developer with access to Claude or ChatGPT can now build that on a Friday afternoon. Martin Alderson said it perfectly: if your product is just "SQL queries wrapped in a nice UI," your competition isn't other SaaS companies anymore. It's every engineer at your customer's company who has a free afternoon.
Building software used to be expensive and hard. Now it's cheaper to build than to buy a subscription.
So What Actually Survives This?
Not everything dies, obviously. Payment processors aren't going anywhere. Neither are huge compliance systems or super complex infrastructure.
But if your whole pitch is "we save you time on repetitive tasks," congrats, you're now competing with AI that literally never sleeps and costs less than your monthly subscription.
EY broke it down: AI is hitting SaaS in four ways - it enhances some tools, compresses others (need fewer features), outshines the simple ones, and straight-up cannibalizes the rest.
The companies winning right now? They're not the ones adding "✨ AI-powered ✨" to their landing page. They're the startups that built their entire product around AI agents from day one.
What Software Companies Need to Do (If They Don't Wanna Die)
Stop charging per person. That model is done.
If you're still doing per-seat pricing in 2026, you're already behind. The new thing is charging for outcomes or usage. "We'll charge you when our AI actually closes a sale" beats "pay us $99/month whether you use it or not."
Become the platform that agents use, not the app humans use.
The winners won't be standalone apps. They'll be the backends that 50 different AI agents connect to. Less "we're a CRM you log into" and more "we're the database that every AI agent writes to."
Actually partner with customers instead of just selling them software.
The old way: "here's the software, figure it out, call support if you're stuck."
The new way: "our AI will do the actual work, and we win when you win."
McKinsey says the successful companies are the ones treating customers like partners, not ATMs with a yearly renewal date.
The Bottom Line
Is software dead? Nah. But the version we've had for the last 25 years - where you pay per employee for tools humans manually operate - is absolutely dying.
By 2026, over 80% of companies will be running AI in production. That's not a prediction anymore. We're already there.
The software companies that make it through won't be the ones with the prettiest UI or the most Zapier integrations. They'll be the ones who accepted that their customer might never open their app because an AI agent is already using their API.
Pretty wild to think about, honestly.