Op-Ed: SaaS is not dead. You are just being sold the funeral
April 20, 2026 – 2:47 pm
The "AI has killed software" narrative has a handful of very loud beneficiaries and a lot of quiet evidence against it. The companies that will survive the next five years are the ones that refuse to treat the hyperscalers as the new gods.
Whenever I make an affirmation, I like to do my research first, and not to sound like a LinkedIn post. I wish more people in this industry did the same, as there is a prevailing mood where we think that big numbers are the whole story.
When the Black Death came among us, people probably thought it was the end. When wars came to our societies, people thought it was the end. Yet, in a strange way, we have a natural power to overcome obstacles and turn change to our advantage.
When AI started to infiltrate our work, and later our personal lives, a large group of people declared that "AI will replace people," that this technology, not even particularly new, would conquer our brains, hearts, and work, and lead us where it wanted. Yet we are still working; people are still writing, thinking, creating, building.
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In the last two years, more and more people have been saying that "SaaS is dead." Of course, this phrase came from someone’s mouth, someone with enough influence to shape general opinion, and everybody was already in black, ready for the funeral.
In August 2024, Klarna’s chief executive, Sebastian Siemiatkowski, sat on an earnings call and mentioned that the Swedish fintech had “shut down Salesforce.” Workday was next. Klarna would build its own AI-driven replacements, a lightweight stack unshackled from the bloat of traditional enterprise software. The quote moved markets. Articles followed with headlines about the death of SaaS. Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, on stage at Dreamforce, was asked to respond to a customer who had apparently decided the future was AI and the past was his product. He looked, by his own admission, embarrassed.
Six months later, Siemiatkowski quietly clarified what had actually happened. Klarna had not replaced Salesforce with AI. It had replaced Salesforce with other SaaS: Deel for HR, third-party tools for CRM, the Swedish graph database Neo4j for data consolidation. Klarna still uses Slack, which is still a Salesforce product. Siemiatkowski himself admitted on X that he was “tremendously embarrassed” by how the story had spiralled.
"No," he wrote, "we did not replace SaaS with an LLM."
This is the single most instructive story in enterprise software of the past two years. The distance between what was said and what was done reveals the mechanics of the entire "SaaS is dead" narrative. The headline travelled. The correction did not.
An industry of analysts, venture capitalists, and foundation model CEOs built a year of marketing on the louder half. Start by asking who gains from the story that software-as-a-service is being replaced by artificial intelligence, because the answer is surprisingly narrow. The hyperscalers do, because AI workloads just…