The Future of SaaS

I mostly agree with this. Dynamically generated UIs and business logic, dynamically sourced data, these things are right at the edge of current agentic capability, so they’re coming soon.

There’s definitely nuance in a few areas that won’t be so easy to just replace with big generalist models. SaaS companies have a lot of value in the sophisticated domain knowledge that is built into their platforms, encoded as business logic at the software layer and institutional knowledge at the knowledge base and employee layers. I don’t think generalist models will be able to easily replicate that depth of specific domain expertise any time soon.

As generative interfaces emerge, it will place an increased demand on companies to expose their special sauce via programmatic interfaces like APIs and MCP servers. The demand may move away from the presentation layer and towards data aggregation, analysis, workflows, etc. Existing “static” interfaces will seem more and more brittle and shallow.

This will drive some interesting trends:

1. Agentic payment gateways
2. Agentic identity
3. Curated data pools
4. Increased demand for SaaS APIs

Are you seeing these trends in your platforms or customer interactions yet? What are you doing to prepare?

Nathan Labenz said:

“I’m of the opinion that most vertical SaaS products are going away. You’re going to end up with horizontal AI platforms that work in every situation. Today, you can dynamically generate UIs - if this gets really good, why would you need a SaaS product for construction, medicine, etc?” 🔗 to full episode with @startupandrew👇 https://lnkd.in/gqUyA2Pq