Synthetic Minds | SaaS Is “Dead”? The Market Just Made a Costly Mistake
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SaaS Panic Is a Category Error, Not a Market Signal
AI just walked out of the lab and into the org chart. It’s no longer showing you what it could do. It’s quietly doing work your team used to spend hours on.
That’s the real shift.
But markets are making a basic category mistake: assuming that because AI agents can finish tasks, they’ll erase the SaaS companies that charge per seat. That’s not analysis. That’s fear dressed up as a thesis, and it will be expensive.
Yes, autonomous agents can stitch tools together, call APIs, and move work from clicking buttons to getting outcomes. OpenClaw made that feel suddenly inevitable. Anything that sells generic workflow, dashboards, or “collaboration” by the seat is now under pressure. Fair.
The leap that isn’t real: the idea that an AI agent can prompt its way into replacing a CRM, a tax engine, or a regulated industry platform. Successful SaaS isn’t code. It’s years of domain decisions: exceptions, permissions, audit trails, compliance, messy data, and integrations that only exist because customers broke things in production.
Vibe coding will ship prototypes faster. It won’t manufacture industry truth.
Domain knowledge remains the moat, because it’s judgment under constraints, not pattern matching.
The winning move is Apple-style discipline: don’t rebuild the commodity layer. Let the frontier labs fight the compute war. Pick the best capability, bolt it onto your proprietary domain layer, and sell outcomes with accountability, and at a premium.
Seats are getting repriced. SaaS isn’t dying. It’s being forced to grow up.
The business model will shift from “pay for seats” to “pay for verified results,” with governance and provenance as the differentiator, not another chatbot.
Are you selling seats, or are you underwriting outcomes?
'Synthetic Minds' continues to reflect the synthetic forces reshaping our world. Quick, curated insights to feed your quest for a better understanding of our evolving synthetic future, powered by Futurwise:
1. In a world where AI-generated faces are becoming increasingly realistic, and most people can no longer spot an AI face, it's time to rethink our assumptions about what's real and what's not. (Neuroscience News)
2. The creator economy is undergoing significant changes, driven by the rise of AI-generated content and shifting business models. How can the creator economy stay afloat in a flood of AI slop? (TechCrunch)
3. The AI landscape is shifting towards decentralized networks, offering a compelling alternative to Big Tech's centralized dominance. (CoinDesk)
4. The NSW Police Force (Australia) is taking a significant step towards embracing artificial intelligence (AI) in policing by establishing an AI centre to oversee its adoption and ensure safe and responsible usage. (itnews)
5. In a move that's being hailed as a game-changer, or as terrifying, for urban planning, China is deploying robotic police officers equipped with cameras to replace human workers and normalize total automation. (econews)
If you are interested in more insights, grab my latest, award-winning, book Now What? How to Ride the Tsunami of Change and learn how to embrace a mindset that can deal with exponential change.
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Thank you.
Mark
