The Four Shifts Rewiring Software Right Now (and What It Means for Founders)

Jan de Vries · 2026-07-17

You have probably seen the headline a hundred times by now: "SaaS is dead." It shows up in founder feeds, in investor memos, and on conference stages from Lisbon to Helsinki. And on the surface, the market seems to agree. Public software valuations have split in two. Legacy SaaS names have repriced sharply, some to their lowest revenue multiples in years. Meanwhile, AI-native software trades at several times that on the very same exchanges, watched by the same analysts. Read quickly, and that gap looks like decline. Read carefully, and it is something more useful. The market is not writing software off. It is repricing it, moving value from tools that help a human work to software that does the work itself. That is not a funeral. For founders willing to build on the right side of the gap, it is the largest opening we have seen in years. To see why, it helps to stop asking whether SaaS is dying and start watching where it is moving. Software is being rewired on four axes at once. ### Shift One: The User Becomes an Agent For twenty-five years, every SaaS product assumed a human in the chair: someone logging in, clicking through screens, reading dashboards. That assumption is quietly breaking. Increasingly, the "user" of your software is another piece of software acting on a person's behalf. Gartner projects that 40% of enterprise applications will include task-specific AI agents by the end of 2026, up from under 5% in 2025. The Swedish fintech Klarna offered an early, blunt version of what that means: a single AI assistant took on the work of some 700 support staff. Klarna later rebalanced, rehiring as service quality slipped. The point is not that everyone gets fired, but that a slice of the work moved to an agent and stayed there. The lesson is that products now have to serve agents as first-class users, not just the humans behind them. If your software cannot be called by an API, it is already invisible. ### Shift Two: The Interface Becomes an API Graphical interfaces exist because humans need to see things. Agents do not need to see; they need to call. So the interface layer of software is being rebuilt for a non-human user. The clearest signal is the Model Context Protocol, the emerging standard that lets agents connect to tools and data. Anthropic, which introduced it, reports it going from near-zero to around 97 million monthly Software Development Kit (SDK) downloads and thousands of public servers in barely eighteen months. Stripe rebuilt its commerce stack so agents could transact directly. The takeaway for founders is simple: if an agent cannot reach your product, it cannot buy, use, or recommend it. The front door is no longer a login screen. ### Shift Three: Pricing Moves from the Seat to the Outcome Per-seat pricing was the financial engine of SaaS, and it assumed one thing: a human occupying the seat. When an agent does the work of ten people, ten seats do not follow. The model has to change, and it already is. Roughly 77% of the largest software companies now use some form of consumption pricing, according to Metronome's 2025 pricing study. Cursor, the AI coding tool, scaled to billions of dollars in annual revenue with a team of only a few hundred people, charging for how much its product is used rather than for how many people log in. That combination, a lean team on usage revenue, is what the market now pays up for. In June of this year, SpaceX agreed to buy Cursor in a $60 billion all-stock deal expected to close later in the year, the largest takeover of a venture-backed startup on record. Founders are no longer selling access to a tool. They are selling units of work. ### Shift Four: The Budget Moves from IT to HR This is the shift that reframes everything. When software sold seats, it was paid for out of the IT budget. When software does the work, it competes for the labor budget instead, and the labor budget is vastly larger. Foundation Capital estimates the opportunity here is enormous. Think about it: your company probably spends more on salaries than on software licenses. If you can replace a $60,000-a-year employee with a $600-a-month agent, the ROI is immediate and massive. That is not a threat to software. It is the single biggest expansion of the addressable market for software in history. ### What This Means for You So, is SaaS dying? No. But the old model is. The companies that will win in the next decade are not the ones building better dashboards. They are the ones building software that does the work. Here is a quick checklist for your next product: - Can an agent use your product without a human logging in? - Is your pricing tied to outcomes, not seats? - Are you competing for labor budget, not IT budget? If you answered no to any of these, you have work to do. The good news is that the opportunity is bigger than ever. The bad news is that the window is closing fast.