The AI SaaSpocalypse: Learning and opportunities for today and beyond

Are leaders in SaaS such as Xero, TechnologyOne and WiseTech about to lose their competitive advantage?

This paper examines reasons for these firms adopting and adapting to become AI winners, and why AI is showing opportunity across many sectors, including resources, energy, real estate and industrials.

AI and its partner, 'big data' are rapidly changing the world in almost every part of our lives. AI is working at so many levels and well beyond what we can see, changing the world as we know it and offering significant opportunity for investors who know where to look, and what for.

While large language models have been around for a decade, it could be argued that AI's true inflection point in the psyche of the general populace was the November 2022 launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), a large language model-based chatbot that has proved a watershed in the potential for AI to change the world.

As an example of how quickly ChatGPT was adopted, while it took 55 months for Spotify to reach 100 million users, ChatGPT reached the same number of users in less than two months.

With the emergence of ChatGPT, it became widely apparent that computers were now 'smart' enough to help humans to solve problems without having to write code; instead, at the straightforward command of our voices and keyboards.

But does this mean that code, which took years but can now be written in days with AI, is the end of technology companies as we know them and, importantly, the death knell for SaaS companies?

The recent market panic of early 2026 which some call  the 'SaaSpocalypse' points at the fear that AI could spell the end for established leaders in SaaS.

There are a number of compelling reasons we believe this is not the case, and that we see AI as not the end of SaaS, but the beginning of new productivity and products which can make SaaS and almost any other leader in the market even stronger.