What does it take to draw a line under the SaaSpocalypse? Shares in software-as-a-service firms, already half their peaks, continue to drift downwards. That’s despite a clutch of decent quarterly results and, in the case of US-listed ServiceNow, a bullish medium-term forecast. Even a company founder’s recent claim that a rogue AI agent mass-deleted his data and backups failed to dent the narrative that AI will eat software’s lunch.
Sure, the prevailing tale is compelling. Off-the-peg AI agents can do much of what enterprise software does when it comes to payroll and other back-office processes. Businesses can even DIY-code their own agents. But the death-of-software story is too simple. SaaS firms bring security and interoperability. They have adapted before, most recently migrating on-premises systems to the cloud.
The best way for companies to ensure they retain their place in corporate IT budgets is to be the repositories of data their customers depend on, and to layer that with AI agents, all working in sync. A retail example: using inventory and customer data, agents can target specific items at consumers and map which is the nearest warehouse from which to dispatch it.