For two decades, enterprisesoftware followed a linear, human-centric value chain. Each layer fed the next, each layer captured margin, and the entire architecture assumed a person sitting at a keyboard navigating screens:
Raw Data → System of Record → APIs & Middleware → SaaS Applications → UI → Human User
The pricingmodel matched the architecture perfectly: per-seat, per-user, per-employee, per-month. More humans interacting with software meant more revenue. Salesforce charges per seat. Workday charges per employee. Adobe charges per creative professional.
This model generated trillions in cumulative enterprisesoftwarevalue. It worked because humans were both the operators and the bottleneck.
In the first week of February 2026, nearly $1 trillion was wiped from software and services stocks. An analyst at Jefferies coined it the “SaaSpocalypse.” Salesforce shed a quarter of its value year-to-date. ServiceNow lost 25%. Thomson Reuters dropped 16%.
The catalysts: Anthropic released professional plugins for Claude Cowork, and OpenAI followed with Frontier — an enterpriseplatform designed to deploy AI agents across, not within, existing business applications. Fortune described Frontier as OpenAI’s bid to become “the operating system of the enterprise.”
Both carried the same structural message: the agent doesn’t navigate your SaaSproduct. The agent replaces the need to navigate it.
Agents don’t consume software the way humans do. They don’t need drop-down menus or dashboards. They consume data via APIs, execute actions via tool calls, and coordinate outcomes via orchestration layers. The design question flips: “What does an agent need to act correctly?” replaces “What is useful for humans to see?”
The SaaS Hourglass
The new value chain isn’t linear. It’s barbelled. Value concentrates at two extremes — the orchestration layer at the top and the proprietary data/context layer at the bottom — while the middle (UI-dependent workflow applications) gets squeezed.
The quiet killer isn’t agents replacing software next quarter. It’s that AI reduces the headcount that uses the software. If 10 agents do the work of 100 people, you need 10 seats, not 100, even if the software persists. Per-seat economics determine revenue decline before architecture changes do.
Gennaro is the creator of FourWeekMBA, which reached about four million business people, comprising C-level executives, investors, analysts, product managers, and aspiring digital entrepreneurs in 2022 alone | He is also Director of Sales for a high-tech scaleup in the AI Industry | In 2012, Gennaro earned an International MBA with emphasis on Corporate Finance and Business Strategy.
