AI is upending the SaaS game

AI agents are fundamentally disrupting the SaaS industry, particularly tools that analyze and display existing data via dashboards. As AI agents can now answer complex data questions directly, SaaS companies must pivot from human-facing UIs to machine-readable interfaces. The key shift: tools that own and produce underlying data (like Datadog) have a stronger position than those that merely read and visualize it. The future customer for developer tooling may be an AI agent consuming MCP endpoints rather than a human browsing a dashboard. SaaS companies must build MCP servers and CLIs for AI agents or risk obsolescence.