The buzz is everywhere: podcasts and LinkedIn are filled with predictions that AI agents will kill off SaaS applications. Investor Oskar Hartmann, in his Unicorn Lab analysis, has taken a firm stance on this shift.
SaaS isn’t dead; the bar has simply been raised. Previously, building a high-quality solution was a long and expensive process. Today, anyone can wrap a few buttons in a sleek interface using AI over a weekend and call it a product. If your project is just a pretty UI with basic automation, you aren’t a product—you are a first draft that can be replicated in two days. And first drafts don’t command high prices.
The breakdown of per-seat pricing
The old logic was simple: Have 10 employees? Buy 10 “seats” and pay for 10 users. It was like buying bus tickets. Now, the work those 10 employees used to do is being handled by a single AI agent. The headcount has dropped, but the workload remains the same.
In the age of AI agents, only those who build truly competitive products will survive. This means deep integration into existing systems, proprietary datasets accumulated over years, and the security guarantees required by large corporations. A product that is an indispensable, secure, and complex part of a business—rather than just a pretty interface—cannot be replaced by a bot.
The strategy is simple, yet often ignored: Find a single, acute pain point your client is feeling right now. Deploy an agent to fix it. Show the result—not a pitch, not a presentation, but a live result.
To determine your project’s true value, you only need to answer one strategic question: What exactly does your product do?
- If it only organizes processes: Sending reminders or visualizing data via dashboards—your product is in grave danger. AI agents are already performing these “auxiliary” tasks faster, more effectively, and at a much lower cost.
- If it delivers operational outcomes: Performing complex calculations, reconciling transactions, ensuring system integrations, and most importantly—taking responsibility for the final result—its market value will only continue to rise.
In today’s market, the winner is not the most attractive interface, but the product that serves as essential infrastructure for business continuity. Reach a level where removing your product from the system causes the business to halt—then, and only then, will no AI agent be able to replace you.
