I called it in Math Man Magazine, February 2026: the SaaS apocalypse. AI drives the cost of building software toward zero. The Salesforce dashboards, the HubSpot workflows, the SAP-era reporting suites your company pays 6 figures for: ask Claude or ChatGPT and it builds one before lunch. That breaks the build-versus-buy equation that created the $5 trillion SaaS industry.
The market already voted. Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Adobe lost $300 billion+ in combined value in 12 months, and the industry now calls it the SaaSpocalypse. 15,000 martech tools on 1 chart is not an ecosystem. It is a wipeout waiting for a trigger.
The last moat falls next: AI-powered data migration drives switching costs to zero. When customers can leave with 1 click, retention is not a strategy. It is a hostage situation ending. Seat-based pricing dies with it; you pay for outcomes, not logins. And the seller goes too: enterprise software passes $500 billion by 2030 with 30%+ of pipeline never touched by a human. AI buys from AI. The steak dinner dies of loneliness.
Asking software CEOs to predict their decline is like asking turkeys to vote for Thanksgiving. So I asked Musk, Jensen, Benioff, and Ellison instead, on the record in my briefing. I sit on a SaaS advisory board myself: the survivors sell outcomes and own the data. The rest sold seats to a world that stopped needing chairs.
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