The firm said the disruption stems from what it calls “agentic arbitrage”—a shift in which AI agents perform tasks across multiple enterprise applications, reducing the need for users to interact with individual software interfaces.
“Agentic AI changes the economics of software,” said George Brocklehurst, managing vice-president at Gartner. “Agentic systems deliver outcomes directly, bypassing traditional user experience (UX)-heavy applications and making the software invisible. This breaks the link between user growth and revenue growth for many enterprise software vendors.”
The trend threatens the long-standing SaaS business model, under which vendors typically charge customers based on the number of employees using their software. If AI agents increasingly execute workflows on behalf of workers, enterprises may require fewer user licences.
This is less an apocalypse and more of a metamorphosis. SaaS will not be destroyed; it will emerge in a different form,” Gartner said.
It said the enterprise buyers are prioritising investments in AI systems that deliver measurable business outcomes, rather than purchasing feature-rich applications.
The report said the software companies will need to embed agentic capabilities into their products, retain customer-specific knowledge and move towards outcome-based pricing to remain competent.
