“No reasons to own software.”
That was a Mizuho analyst in a note to clients last week. Not a bear case. A baseline.
What caught my eye wasn’t the line. It was how familiar it already feels.
This week I replaced an internal workflow that replaces three subscriptions with something that runs on pennies of tokens. Not because I’m trying to “disrupt SaaS”. Because it was faster to build the edge case than to find a tool that fit it.
That’s the shift. SaaS was built on a gap. Vendors knew how to build. Customers knew what they needed. The vendor got paid for the translation.
Agents are compressing that gap. If you can describe the workflow clearly, you can often get a working version quickly. The constraint moves from engineering capacity to context.
Yes, the market is starting to price that in. The Morgan Stanley SaaS index is down around 15% since January 1st.
This doesn’t mean Salesforce disappears tomorrow. Compliance, integrations, distribution, trust, all real.
But it does force a new question for every SaaS vendor: Is your value in the software, or in the outcome you automate?
