The old SaaS deal was simple. One product for everyone. A settings page nobody touches. Maybe a few toggles that make you feel like you're "customizing" something. Spoiler: you weren't.
The new deal looks completely different. One base platform — and a thousand personal layers on top, assembled and improved by AI agents. Software stops being a thing you buy and starts being a thing that grows. A process, not a product.
It constantly adapts to your team, your industry, even how you personally like to work. Right now, building something custom for a single user is economic insanity. Their feature request gets tossed into the backlog — and that's where it dies. But agentic personalization is about to flip that math on its head.
Here's the good news: SaaS isn't going anywhere. It's just changing shape.
The platforms that survive will be the ones with:
- Deep industry data
- Network effects
- Solid infrastructure
- APIs and modular architecture
- The guts to let agents inside the product
And pricing? Probably shifting too. Usage-based instead of "pay every month whether you open the app or not." Because in a world where software actually works for you, charging for time makes no sense. Charging for value does.