(Note: Our blogs are not written by GenAI).
For more than two decades, SaaS has been the foundation of modern marketing. Every campaign, dashboard, workflow, and report runs through software subscriptions. SaaS-based marketing tech stack has become the operating system for marketing.
But if you zoom out, something becomes clear – we have seen such domination before, and it did not end well for most incumbents.
A Lesson from the 90s: Dominance Is Temporary
In the 1990s, enterprise software giants dominated marketing, sales, and service. Companies like E.piphany, Broadvision, and Unica defined marketing automation. Siebel owned sales. Remedy and Kana powered service. These were serious companies with strong revenue, deep customer relationships, and market credibility.
I worked at one of them, called Broadbase (later merged with Kana). We shipped CRM software on physical CD box sets. We had an entire department called Release Management whose sole job was to package and distribute those releases (CD’s) to customers. That world felt permanent.
Then the Cloud arrived.
Salesforce was founded in 1999. Other companies also started appearing in early 2000’s.
It did not destroy the existing giants overnight. In fact, many continued to post strong financial performance well into mid-2000’s. The revenue growth masked structural decline. The shift was fundamental, but not immediate.
You may remember the similar shift happened when iPhone was launched in 2007 – Blackberry revenues kept rising many years after that, all to come to an abrupt end.
When financial crisis hit in late 2000’s, company budgets tightened. The pay-as-you-go SaaS model became far more attractive than heavy upfront enterprise deals. This accelerated the transition from enterprise software to SaaS.
Dominance always feels permanent – until it isn’t.
What Is Happening Now Is Bigger Than the Cloud
We are now at the beginning of a shift that is more profound than the move to SaaS. There are two forces at play here:
- Shift to Agentic systems: SaaS applications execute predefined workflows. They automate the processes that YOU design. On the other hand, Agentic systems reason, recommend, and increasingly, ACT. They do not just execute instructions; they participate in decisions.
- Dramatic lowering of software building costs: What once required large engineering teams, multi-year roadmaps, and massive capital can now be built by smaller teams in a fraction of the time. Development cycles compress. Barriers of entry shrink. When the cost of building software collapses, defensibility weakens.
The Myth of Domain Knowledge
Incumbents often argue that their advantage lies in domain knowledge. This argument is not new – it was made in the 1990’s as well.
The reality is that public knowledge can be acquired, for a price. AI systems can absorb domain knowledge at scale. More importantly, much of the proprietary knowledge that matters belongs to the customer. If the customer switches tools, they do not lose their domain knowledge – they just change an interface.
In a world where AI can recreate interfaces and workflows rapidly, domain knowledge is not a durable moat.
Open Will Beat Closed – The Mass Extinction Phase
The next dominant platforms will not resemble today’s SaaS stacks. They will be open, driven by MCP-like interoperability, and designed to work with agents created both internally and externally. They will allow companies to extend functionality without waiting for vendor roadmaps.
Current SaaS systems will increasingly resemble client-server software in the 1990’s. They will still function and generate revenue. But they will feel rigid and slow compared to the open, agent-compatible platforms.
Over the next five to ten years, many SaaS vendors will merge, be acquired, or quietly disappear. Some will attempt to survive by layering AI features onto legacy architecture. A few will successfully reinvent themselves, but most will not.
We are entering a period of mass extinction.
The Rebirth: The Agentic Marketing Stack
Extinction is always followed by rebirth.
We will likely see two are three AI-native marketing platforms emerge. They will orchestrate agents and manage identity and context. On top of these platforms, customers will build its own marketing ecosystems. Instead of buying dozens of disconnected SaaS tools, marketing departments will select a core platform and layer in internal agents and external specialized agents.
Your stack will become a strategic asset, not a rented configuration of licenses.
This shift will also change the vendor landscape. While the number of core platforms may shrink, the number of specialized agents will expand dramatically. We will see agents tailored to specific industries, regions, company sizes, and growth models. Specialization will increase. Innovation cycles will shorten.
What This Means for Marketing Leaders
The old question was which SaaS tool to buy. The new question will be which platform to build on, how to control our strategic intelligence, and how do we design our agent ecosystem. The CMO will own strategic models and orchestration layer.
The role of the CMO will shift from orchestrating tools to architecting ecosystems.
Extinction Creates Opportunity
As with every platform shift, the collapse will not be dramatic at first. SaaS financials may look stable. Your dashboards will still function, and vendors will continue releasing incremental features. But the underlying economics has already shifted.
When that shift reaches critical mass, it will accelerate.
CMOs who reduce dependency on monolithic stacks, invest in internal strategic intelligence, and experiment early with agentic systems will create durable advantage. Those who cling to legacy models will find themselves negotiating from a position of diminishing leverage.
The extinction of SaaS, as we know it, is coming. However, the rebirth will be even stronger. The only question is whether you will lead it or react to it.
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