$300 billion evaporated in 48 hours. Welcome to the SaaSpocalypse.
In October 2024, I wrote about the next wave of AI: agents. In May 2025, I wrote about the end of the developer as we know them. Both articles shared a thesis: AI is not coming to assist. It is coming to execute.
The first week of February proved us right in the most brutal way possible.
Anthropic launched a set of plugins for its Cowork tool — essentially markdown files that encode legal, financial, and sales expertise. Nothing revolutionary on the surface. But the market understood something that many CIOs still have not processed: if Thomson Reuters’ business logic fits in a text file that an AI agent can read and execute, their $200/user/month software has an existential problem.
Thomson Reuters lost 57% from its highs. ServiceNow 48%. Salesforce 43%. The S&P software index had its worst month since October 2008.
But the interesting part is not the decline. It is the thesis behind it.
Satya Nadella said it in December 2024: “SaaS applications are CRUD databases with business logic on top. Agents will absorb that logic.” Foundation Capital put a number on it: $4.6 trillion in opportunity. They called it “Service as Software” — the inversion of the SaaS model. You no longer sell tools for humans to solve problems. You sell outcomes. The agent does the work.
A Palantir client summed it up better than any analyst: “All third-party software must justify its existence. And so far, it has not been able to.”
This does not mean Salesforce or SAP will disappear tomorrow. Switching costs are real. Deep integrations provide protection. But the per-seat pricing model has its days numbered. IDC predicts it will be obsolete by 2028. And companies that do not transition to outcome-based models will discover their moat was narrower than they thought.
I have spent over 20 years leading technology transformation in banking and education. I have seen panic cycles before — cloud, mobile, blockchain. But this time is different. It is not a new layer being added to the stack. It is a layer that absorbs the others.
The question for every CIO today is not “how do I integrate AI into my software.” It is “how much of my software can an agent replace with a markdown file and access to my APIs.”
If the answer makes you uncomfortable, you are probably already late.