SaaS is not dead. But it is slow and rigid.
It is also under pressure from both ends. At the bottom, small businesses now use AI to build simple tools instead of paying monthly subscriptions. At the top, enterprises with their own engineers and governance are redoing the build-versus-buy maths. What took years and millions now takes months and a fraction of the budget.
But the real story is a third front. And that is where enterprise AI wins: the work that happens before data enters the system.
The hidden chapter
Take an insurance claim or a monthly payroll run.
Before any data reaches the expensive platform, people do the real work. Claims handlers check policy wordings, limits and reserving rules across systems that don’t talk to each other. Payroll specialists reconcile timesheets, apply client rules and labour agreements, and chase the exceptions every month brings.
Some rules were never updated. Calculations sit in different departments. The final call often rests on judgement that lives only in senior experts’ heads.
These people are the enterprise’s human glue. Every regulatory change and every exception lands on them, under deadline. Only then does the data become “official” in the system of record. Errors included.
SaaS stores the answer. It doesn’t know how the answer was reached.
SaaS was built to receive clean data, not to create it. It waits for the hard work to be done. It can’t move at the speed of a new regulation, a new client rule or a one-off exception. That work still happens by hand, against the clock.
Where AI comes in
Agentic workflows sit above and before the system of record. They do the work while it happens:
- They capture the rules, including the unwritten ones.
- They catch the exception before it becomes a correction.
- They leave evidence behind every decision.
The result is simple. What reaches the record is right the first time.
The new moat
In an AI world, the lasting advantage belongs to whoever owns the workflow and the data it creates. Every exception resolved and every expert judgement captured builds institutional intelligence. A quickly built clone can’t copy that.
This isn’t about replacing people. It’s about giving the people who do the invisible work the speed and support they have always lacked.
SaaS keeps the record. AI makes it right.
By Vanda Giannara, CEO & Co-Founder, DGTAL