Been chewing on this for a few weeks and want to put it to people who actually live in the SaaS world.
The hypothesis: a lot of SaaS companies that have charged premium prices for years (Salesforce, Atlassian, Docusign, Mailchimp, Seek, REA here in Australia, Xero, MYOB to name a few) are about to face serious pricing pressure from AI challengers. Not because they will be technically better (yet), but the cost and time to build a SaaS product that does 80% of what these incumbents do has collapsed by something like 10x in the last 18 months and will only only increase.
Three thoughts on this on a deeper level:
Vertical SaaS is the most exposed. Every "Salesforce for plumbers" can now be built by a solo founder in a few weekends. Or by an agency for a tenth of what licencing costs. The pricing power those companies built up is going to compress... fast.
Mid-market unbundling is next. If you're a 50-person company paying $150 per seat for a tool that does 50 things and you only use 5, the pitch from a $20 AI challenger doing those 5 things perfectly fine is going to land hard.
The bundle premium dies. Half of the reson Salesforce can charge what it does is because rebuilding all that integration is hell. AI easts ingration costs too.
Counterthought is if distribution is still the moat, not code or cost. Two-sided networking effects don't go away because building got cheap.
So, the honest question: Does cheap and efficient building eat the long tail and mid-market while incumbents keep the enterprise top spot? Or, do we actually see a Salesforce scale company displaced by an AI-native challenger inside 10-years?