From Software to Outcomes: How AI is Reshaping SaaS.

Every major technology follows the same pattern.

What was revolutionary becomes ordinary. And what's ordinary gets slowly embedded into society and that's when the counter-movement begins.

Electricity didn't disappear, it became invisible. The internet didn't lose value, it just became the new normal.

The Gartner Hype Cycle: Every technology follows this pattern from inflated expectations to real productivity. AI is no exception.

And now, I believe AI is entering that same phase.

AI today is being commoditized at the speed of light, and it won't be long before it becomes the new normal. But at the same time, the startup world feels louder than ever crowded with B2B AI SaaS companies, demos, and "AI-powered" products all competing for attention.

But today, I'm going to discuss a simple question that came to my mind:

If anyone can build software in minutes, personalize it instantly, and iterate endlessly—what exactly is left to sell? Why would someone pay for a basic app when they can just generate something tailored to their needs on demand?

In this blog, I want to argue that AI doesn't kill SaaS. It commoditizes knowledge, collapses traditional moats, and forces a shift away from software as a product toward outcomes as a service.

How AI unlocks ‘Personalised Knowledge’

The internet already made knowledge free decades ago.

During the software revolution and the internet boom, access to knowledge and skills skyrocketed. Tutorials, blogs, courses, and open-source code almost anything you wanted to learn was available to anyone, often for free. But there was a limitation.

Internet knowledge is static and broadcasted. It's written for everyone, which means it's perfect for no one. You had to spend time finding the right content, translate it into your own context, fill in the gaps, and hope you were understanding it correctly.

AI changes this completely.

Knowledge is no longer one-to-many. It is shared on a 1:1 basis, at immense speed (Critical).

You can reshape information until it fits how you think and what you are trying to do. You can counter-question anything instantly. You can ask for explanations in exactly the form you need and keep refining them until they click.

This is what I like to call Personalized knowledge.

The real power of AI lies in this shift. Knowledge no longer flows in one direction.

This collapses the knowledge gap entirely and instantly, the most powerful form of inequality the modern world ever had.

And once that happens, something fundamental changes in how value is created.

When knowledge and skills are available on demand, personalized, and free, they stop being a moat. No one pays for frameworks anymore.

So if a product's value was essentially knowledge packaged into features, AI exposes it immediately.

What people will pay for instead is only and only outcomes. (I’ll discuss this at length in upcoming blogs)

How AI is reshaping SaaS from Selling Software to Selling Outcomes

To understand this, think about what SaaS actually sells.

SaaS isn't about selling software it's selling knowledge encoded into a product.

Every SaaS product represents someone's understanding of a problem: workflows, best practices, edge cases, decisions, all written into code. The software is just the delivery mechanism. What users are really paying for is the thinking behind it.

But That assumption is now breaking. How AI is Reshaping SaaS

Let me paint you a picture of 2030:

You wake up and think, “I need a habit tracker that does X, Y, and Z exactly how I want it.” You open your AI assistant and say exactly that. Thirty seconds later, you have a custom app tailored perfectly to your needs.

No browsing app stores. No monthly subscription.

Now ask yourself in that world, why would you ever pay for a generic habit tracker from the App Store?

This is because the knowledge and logic behind it are no longer scarce.

When knowledge becomes personalized, interactive, and instantly accessible, the value of packaging it into features drops sharply. If I can ask an AI how to design a habit system, adapt it to my lifestyle, and rebuild it whenever my needs change, the product starts to feel replaceable.

So if you’re building SaaS right now, there are a few hard questions worth asking:

• Am I selling knowledge, or am I delivering a service?

• Could someone generate what I’ve built in a day or two with AI?

• Is my product’s value in what it does, or in the knowledge of how to build it?

Because if your entire business exists only as a bridge between someone’s problem and the knowledge required to solve it, that bridge is about to evaporate.

AI removes the need for intermediaries whose only role was translating knowledge into products.

What survives is software that delivers outcomes.

The Contrarian Path Forward

So where does this leave us?

I believe there's an opportunity for startups to take a contrarian approach to AI.

Don't make AI your selling point. Make it invisible.

Everyone right now is racing to slap "AI-powered" on everything. But the companies that will win aren't the ones shouting about AI, they're the ones embedding it so deeply that users forget it's even there.

Don't get me wrong you should absolutely be using AI. But it shouldn't be what you're selling. It should be the invisible infrastructure that makes your product work seamlessly.

Because in a world where everyone has access to the same AI, differentiation won't come from the technology. It will come from outcomes and that is exactly what people will pay for.