Dive Brief:
- Agentic AI is slated to continue to disrupt the enterprise application software market with up to $234 billion in spending between now and 2030 as companies shift their spending, Gartner predicted in a report published last week.
- When AI agents complete tasks across multiple systems within enterprises, it reduces users’ needs to interact with traditional software interfaces, Gartner found. It’s already affecting the pricing of traditional SaaS platforms, and by 2030, the market price adjustments will account for about 20% of enterprises’ SaaS spending, the report predicted.
- Agentic systems deliver outcomes while bypassing the traditional user experience of software applications, said George Brocklehurst, managing VP at Gartner, in a statement. “This breaks the link between user growth and revenue growth for many enterprise software vendors,” he said.
Dive Insight:
AI and agentic systems have irrevocably changed the software industry, redefining how it’s built, priced and used within enterprises.
Earlier this year, newly released AI models spread fears of a “SaaSpocalypse,” or a disruption of traditional SaaS application use and pricing. It has forced SaaS companies to keep scaling revenue as operational complexity rises, margins tighten and IT spending comes under scrutiny.
That disruption is not going away any time soon, the report found. Gartner predicted that enterprise buyers will deemphasize buying more tools or dashboards, which drive their IT spending up, and instead focus on outcomes. Software pricing has been undergoing changes to reflect the emphasis on outcomes over subscription models.
In June, GitHub shifted from offering a flat price for its premium request model to charging based on token usage for “input, output, and cached tokens, according to the published API rates for each model,” per the company’s announcement. Zendesk and Workday also rolled out changes to their pricing structure.
Along with changing pricing models, SaaS providers that deliver end-to-end autonomous workflows, with an emphasis on cross-system orchestration, will likely fare better amid the spending transition, Brocklehurst said.
Those likely to succeed will embed agentic capabilities at the point of execution for their offerings, and will find a way to capture customer context and knowledge, Brocklehurst said. These strategies are more likely than traditional SaaS models to help get users their ROI, the report said.
“Better outcomes from AI require systems that can retain deep institutional memory and customer context over time,” Brocklehurst said.
Brocklehurst added that legacy SaaS companies will likely be outshone by newer offerings that prioritize these horizontal agentic platforms. AI native startups and service providers might act as an agentic layer across enterprise systems as they redesign workflows around AI, he said.
SaaS providers that embed an agentic layer into their platforms will likely be able to capture existing spend and incremental budget that’s added when their clients achieve ROI, the report said. It will continue being a major period of transition for traditional vendors, and those that don’t adopt agentic systems might not survive, the report said.
“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 and platforms to support agentic enabled cross-domain workflows,” Brocklehurst said.
