The SaaSpocalypse of February was not an accident. It was a warning. The market saw what many CIOs still do not want to see: the business logic that justifies billions in licensing fees fits in a text file that an AI agent can execute.
But the interesting question is not what gets destroyed. It is what emerges.
From SaaS to SaS#
The industry consensus already has a name for this transition: SaS — Services-as-Software. The term, popularized by Foundation Capital in their thesis on the $4.6 trillion agentic AI opportunity, inverts the formula that has dominated enterprise software for two decades. SaaS sold software as a service. SaS sells services as software — autonomous agents that deliver outcomes, not interfaces.
It is the difference between selling a scalpel and selling the surgery.
Others call it WaaS — Workers-as-a-Service. Or simply what it is: the Agent Economy. An economy where companies do not buy software licenses. They hire artificial employees. Employees that do not negotiate salaries, do not request time off, and scale without limit.
The reconversion map#
If the thesis is correct, the question is not whether the major SaaS players will reconvert, but when and how. Here are my concrete predictions:
SAP will stop selling FI/CO licenses for accounting. Instead, it will offer an accounting agent that, based on business events — an invoice issued, a payment received, a period close — autonomously maintains the books in SAP. Humans will stop interacting with SAP’s UI. The agent will interact with SAP’s API. The financial controller will shift from operating the system to supervising the agent.
Salesforce will stop selling CRM per user. It will offer a sales agent that qualifies leads, updates opportunities, schedules follow-ups, and generates forecasts. Salespeople will stop filling in Salesforce fields. The agent will extract information from emails, calls, and meetings, keeping the pipeline updated. The sales manager’s role will shift from chasing their team to update the CRM to reviewing the agent’s decisions.
ServiceNow will stop selling support tickets per seat. It will offer an operations agent that diagnoses incidents, executes runbooks, escalates when necessary, and closes tickets without human intervention. Eighty percent of L1 and L2 support will be invisible to humans.
Workday will stop selling HR modules per employee. It will offer a people management agent that processes payroll, manages absences, generates compliance reports, and executes full onboarding — from provisioning access to scheduling the first week’s agenda.
HubSpot will stop selling a marketing suite. It will offer a growth agent that generates content, optimizes campaigns, segments audiences, and adjusts budgets in real time based on conversions. The CMO will not operate tools. They will conduct an orchestra of agents.
Atlassian will stop selling Jira per developer. It will offer a delivery agent that breaks epics into tasks, assigns work based on capacity, detects blockers, and generates progress reports. The engineering manager will shift from managing a board to managing a strategy.
The pattern#
In every case, the pattern is the same: the human stops being the software operator and becomes the agent’s supervisor. The value is not in the interface. It is in the intelligence.
And the business model transforms with it. You no longer charge per seat — because there are no seats. You charge per outcome. Per invoice processed. Per lead qualified. Per incident resolved. Per payroll executed.
The companies that understand this first will capture the market. Those that keep selling interfaces with a copilot bolted on top will discover that a markdown file and an agent with access to their APIs do the same job at a fraction of the cost.
The Agent Economy is not coming. It is already here. The question is whether you are hiring agents or still buying licenses.