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Why AI Will End the Age of Giant SaaS? #
For twenty years, the deal was simple. If your company needed to manage customers, you paid Salesforce. If you needed to run your finances, supply chain, and payroll, you paid SAP or Cegid or Oracle. You didn’t build these things yourself, because building them was insane — a multi-year, multi-million-dollar undertaking requiring a small army of engineers you couldn’t hire and couldn’t keep. So you rented. Everyone rented. And the companies that owned the software collected a toll on nearly every transaction in the modern economy. That arrangement is about to break. Not slowly, and not partially. The economics that made giant SaaS inevitable are dissolving, and the thing replacing them is a large language model that can write, maintain, and reason about software well enough that a mid-sized company can finally afford to build the tools it always wished it had. This is the end of big SaaS as we knew it — and the interesting question is no longer whether, but how fast, and who gets caught in the collapse.
The moat was never the software #
Here’s the uncomfortable truth the incumbents don’t want examined too closely: the actual software inside a CRM or an ERP is not that special.