The debate over whether AI will kill enterprise software is missing the point entirely. Leaders from Intuit, Salesforce, Box, and others have all been quoted defending the role of SaaS in the emerging universe of AI. Thoma Bravo’s Holden Spaht recently argued, “Software is AI if you do it right.” I’d go further: SaaS and AI are not different things. This is all software. And some SaaS companies — not all, but some — with tremendous historic moats will be able to achieve a 1+1 = 3 by moving quickly to leverage AI.
The reason comes down to one thing: data.
