Competing in SaaS in the AI-era

Every traditional SaaS platform is being challenged today with AI. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again. In this post, I’m going to dig into the platform that is about to happen to challenge existing SaaS platforms —- and how these platforms can fight back and evolve to stay relevant.

When the Cloud emerged, every single On-Premise software platform was ripe for disruption. When Mobile emerged, every single Desktop-first platform was ripe for disruption for a mobile era. And now that AI and Agents are emerging, traditional SaaS platforms are ripe for disruption.

At every single one of these inflection points, there were large platforms that acquired great startups and adapted their way to staying dominant. Also at every single one of these platform shifts, there were also large platforms that died. As with every platform shift, there are going to be winners and losers in this AI decade.

In this post, I’m going to cover three things:

• The evolution of Business Software from Spreadsheet → SaaS

• How AI is going to impact existing SaaS platforms

• How existing SaaS platforms can transform to AI-Leaders