Dive Brief:
- The enterprise software market is under siege from AI agents that threaten traditional pricing and consumption models, according to Gartner. As much as $234 billion in SaaS spending through 2030 is at risk from agentic arbitrage, which happens when agents programmed to complete tasks across multiple systems bypass user interfaces, the analyst firm found.
- “Agentic AI changes the economics of software,” Gartner Managing VP George Brocklehurst said in the release. “It will also lead to a redefinition of ‘Saaspocalypse,’ the disaggregation of the legacy SaaS market as we know it today. This is less an apocalypse and more of a metamorphosis.”
- The trend will redirect IT budgets toward outcome-centered services even as software spending grows by roughly 12% through 2030, according to Brocklehurst. “While this shift is posing an existential threat for vendors who are defending legacy dashboards and seat-based models, it creates a substantial revenue opportunity for vendors who are enabling and developing services,” he said.
Dive Insight:
Software is in for a rough ride, thanks to AI. But the industry is headed down a different path than market analysts anticipated last year, when anxious investors hit the sell button on Salesforce and other SaaS heavyweights.
While AI coding tools have taken some of the grunt work out of software development, most businesses aren’t planning to cancel CRM or ERP subscriptions in favor of homebaked apps. Enterprises are looking more keenly at improving processes than simply adding AI tools to the tech stack.
“Enterprise buyers are fatigued,” Brocklehurst told Channel Dive. “They don't want to buy more IT faster; they want to buy better outcomes. They want seamless integration into their existing workflows, inherent safety and clarity on ROI.”
The millions of enterprise software dollars up for grabs over the next several years will be funneled to providers that can deliver agents trained on an organization’s data and processes.
“A CRM is not your sales process,” Brocklehurst said. “It’s a component in your sales process, but there's a lot that sits outside of it both formally in spreadsheets and PowerPoints, and informally with your staff.”
Brocklehurst expects businesses to favor agentic tools fine tuned to navigate a full software stack and work with rather than against employees and stakeholders.
Gartner estimates only a small fraction of agents currently on the market are capable of the persistent memory, cross-domain reasoning and advanced learning that business process automation demands. “Our estimate is that about 70% are agent-washing,” Brocklehurst said.
As automation capabilities mature, organizations will need outside expertise to forge stronger data foundations and handle the nitty gritty work of integrating enterprise software systems — skills that systems integrators, IT service providers and other channel firms have been honing for years.
“It may sound a bit boring, but you need better business project management capabilities,” Brocklehurst said. “That’s things like how you budget, align with stakeholders and quantify ROI. There’s large body of enterprises that lack some or all of those skills. Helping them up the maturity curve is an opportunity for service providers.”
