AI Isn’t Killing SaaS. SaaS Is Killing Itself.

SaaStr reports that Jason Lemkin is arguing legacy B2B software vendors aren't being killed by AI—they're killing themselves. He points to Adobe Marketo, which his company pays sixty thousand dollars a year for: down for a day and a half, it missed a newsletter send to four hundred fifty thousand subscribers, left a broken unsubscribe link live for weeks, and the vendor's answer was a twenty percent price increase. The core issue: Marketo was built for humans clicking through dashboards, not for AI agents. No webhooks, poll-based, rate-capped, and an API untouched for years. When Lemkin's team tried to automate basic work against it, they couldn't—so they rebuilt the unsubscribe flow themselves in an afternoon elsewhere. This, he argues, is the new churn motion: not a feature battle, but an agent-operability test. Across B2B, vendors saddled with debt from twenty twenty-one deal multiples—Pluralsight, Medallia, Qualtrics—are cutting roadmaps and raising prices instead of modernizing, a signal they've abandoned the effort to earn the customer.

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