100%
The debate about AI killing SaaS is asking the wrong question. The death of software has been announced more than once. Open source would kill proprietary software. Cloud and SaaS would make on-prem obsolete. Usage-based pricing would bury the subscription model. Each time, the eulogies were wrong. Each time, the new model layered on top and both sides converged — pulled together by what enterprises actually pay for: accountability, reliability, and someone to blame when things fail. AI will be no different. What we're entering is a Red Queen race — a concept from evolutionary biology where rival species must continuously evolve just to survive, not because they're improving in absolute terms, but because their competitors are evolving at the same time. The prey gets faster; so does the predator. Neither wins. Both are forced to keep running. 🟥 👑 Those that stand in place still will die. Most are already running. 🐰 SaaS incumbents and AI-native companies are locked into exactly this dynamic. Frontier models improve symmetrically through APIs. Access to better models isn't a moat. Customer context, workflow integration, and institutional trust are. The companies that win won't be pure AI-native players, and they won't be legacy SaaS vendors doing AI as a bolt-on. They'll be the ones who solved the convergence problem fastest. The hidden SaaS advantage is time. AI compresses development cycles, but it doesn't compress institutional risk tolerance. Enterprises still take years to evaluate, migrate, retrain, and exit contracts. That gap is where incumbents adapt. The future isn’t wholesale replacement. It’s convergence 🔄 As the Red Queen said to Alice: “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Thanks to Geektime גיקטיים for the opportunity to publish the full article. Link in the comments 👇
