The three forces reshaping the future of enterprise SaaS

For years, enterprise Software as a Service (Saas) has enjoyed a comfortable position at the center of organizational processes.

Users who wanted to raise a ticket, process an invoice or manage a workflow would log into their employer’s cloud application.

The user interface was the gateway to the work, and the provider’s business model followed naturally: charge for seats, expand adoption, and grow revenue as more users spend more time inside the platform.

Agentic AI is beginning to change that.

As users increasingly deploy AI agents, either to carry out tasks within SaaS platforms or to deliver functionality outside them, organizations require fewer seats – hitting providers’ subscription revenues.

At the same time, AI is making bespoke software faster and cheaper to build, giving organizations a credible alternative to buying another SaaS platform.

Why accept subscription costs and vendor lock-in, when cheaper alternatives may achieve the same outcome? None of this means SaaS is about to disappear, but its position at the center of enterprise software is under threat.

SaaS vendors are facing three structural challenges that will reshape the economics of enterprise software.

Agents become the user The first threat is simple: users may have AI agents carry out tasks within the SaaS platform, reducing the need for human users, or build agentic capabilities outside those platforms altogether.

That is a serious problem for any SaaS vendor whose business depends on people living in the interface.

If an agent can resolve a support query, update a record or complete a routine transaction, the user never has to touch the application.

We’re already seeing this in practice.

In some IT service management projects, agents now resolve such a high proportion of tickets that organizations need far fewer users interacting with the SaaS platform.

As buyers begin questioning whether they still need premium software for the shrinking proportion of manual work, the economics start to shift.