Premium: The Hater’s Guide To The SaaSpocalypse

Source: Where’s Your Ed At Date: 2026-03-13 URL: https://www.wheresyoured.at/hatersguide-saas/

Summary

Premium piece arguing that the “AI SaaSpocalypse” narrative misidentifies the cause of SaaS slowdown — the real crisis is a business model that was always unsustainable, built on false assumptions of perpetual retention and financed by reckless PE and VC debt. Between 2018-2022, software companies were 30-40% of PE deals, all priced on assumptions that collapsed when growth decelerated. Zitron catalogs actual AI revenue from major enterprise vendors: Salesforce Agentforce at ~$800M ARR (1% of revenue), ServiceNow Now Assist producing vague metrics nowhere near promises, Adobe Firefly at ~1.5% of quarterly revenue. Conclusion: “nobody appears to be able to make much money selling AI” except the two frontier labs.

Implications

• The enterprise AI revenue data is the most important part. These are the numbers that get buried in earnings calls. Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Adobe have massive sales forces and existing enterprise relationships — if they can’t move AI revenue to >5% of total in multi-year pushes, the “AI everywhere” narrative is marketing.
• SaaS + AI consolidation pressure. The debt-financed SaaS stack is already under pressure; AI represents another cost center, not a revenue center, for most buyers. The companies that survive will be those that can absorb AI costs at scale — i.e., the largest platforms, not the long tail of point solutions.
• Watch: Next Salesforce and ServiceNow earnings for updated AI revenue disclosures; whether “Agentforce” growth can break the 2% revenue threshold by end of 2026.