The great B2B SaaS replatforming

Things which will disappear by 2026

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are entirely my own and do not represent the official position, strategy, or opinions of my employer. This is purely a personal perspective based on my observations of the industry.

Reading through these bullet points will take less than 2 minutes. If you see your org in this list, go ahead and read the entire post. If not, you should get back to building.

• Your org is still hiring outbound SDRs like it's 2018—with a focus on call volume, activity metrics, and "grit”. SDR/Sales job descriptions still talk about "hustle," "cold calls per day," and "objection handling," instead of AI tooling, account strategy, prompt techniques, or agent coordination.

• Sales productivity continues to be measured by number of meetings booked/outreach rates, where the first outreach takes 48+ hours

• Marketing performance is tied to form fills, ebook downloads, and lead magnet conversions—without anyone asking if those leads actually close. You also worry about declining form fill conversion rates and celebrate growing rates irrespective of what's happening with revenue

• Email nurture flows are built in first-gen MAPs (no names, but you know who I'm talking about) still based on rigid stage gates instead of adaptive paths.

• Onboarding is a tooltip tour, maybe a checklist..doesn't change based on who the user is. AI shows up as an "add-on" feature—not something that's actually embedded in the product flow

• The website is static. Everywhere. Everyone sees the same homepage, no matter who they are or where they came from. Gated PDFs and whitepapers still dominate your content strategy, even though no one reads them and most links go straight to bounce

• Support teams are scaling by headcount, not by training or tuning AI agents. CS teams are mostly manual. No ticket routing, no sentiment tracking, no proactive saves. Just check-ins and QBR decks

• Analytics teams are still being asked to build a new dashboard every time someone wants a metric, instead of designing clean semantic layers for agents to use. BI tools are everywhere, but usage is still 5% of the org. Most dashboards were made for QBRs and haven't been opened since. You are still hiring analysts who can make BI reports.

• Pricing is still seat-based—even for products where usage and seat count have nothing to do with each other

• Your marketing teams have low to no fluency in LLMs, prompt chaining, or agent workflows, and your analytics team doesn’t even have Cursor/Windsurf installed on their laptops.

• No one's testing agentic experiences or AI-native growth loops. There's no experimentation budget carved out for it either

Sounds like your org? Don't worry at all, and here's why.

The SaaS model most of us grew up with is starting to break down in ways that are easy to ignore unless you're looking closely. If you're building, investing, or even just working in software today, you've probably felt it already. A friend who used to run a big outbound team now tells you they're shutting down a big chunk of their SDR org. A startup founder in your network just posted on LinkedIn a record MRR with a team of three. You open a product and instead of a tour or walkthrough, you're greeted by an AI that knows exactly what you're trying to do. You see Tobi Lutke posting "Before asking for more Headcount and resources, teams must demonstrate why they cannot get what they want done using AI." , and you come across Klarna's article stating their agent does the work equivalent of 700 full-time agents and wonder why your team is struggling. All of this is happening at once, but most people still talk about it like a set of random tactics, and not what it actually is: the end of a certain kind of SaaS company.

The last decade was about getting better at a model we already understood. There was a pretty standard playbook, and most companies ran some version of it. You generated leads, captured them through forms, routed them to BDRs, and tried to move them through onboarding. You charged per seat, tracked pipeline in a CRM, and scaled headcount as a signal that things were working. You built dashboards for every team and layered on tools to make the engine run more predictably. Finance had their own thing going—usually a Google Sheet with 12 tabs, pulling from six places, that only one person knew how to update. And for a while, all of it more or less worked.

That's the part that's ending. And it's not because some new GTM guru wrote a different playbook—it's because the foundations have changed. Buyers have more context. AI has flattened the cost of building and shipping — Product tours are turning into real conversations. The go-to-market motion that used to require a 50-person team is now getting handled by a founder and a few agents. And the friction we used to accept—forms, seat-based pricing, linear onboarding, headcount as leverage—isn't just outdated. It's starting to get in the way.

This isn't a list of trends and it's not even just a corporate hype anymore. It's a picture of what's already changing, drawn from what I'm seeing in my own work and in conversations with SaaS founders, growth leaders, sales operators, product managers, and investors across the US, Europe, India, and Southeast Asia. Unfortunately, a lot of very senior executives across organizations still think it is hype or they have a lot of time to catch up.

I have a front-row seat to some of this shift as an “AI adopter”, and what’s happening is wild. Just last week, a colleague told me they replaced six workflows with one agentic workflow over a weekend. The week before, a good friend, and a founder cut their onboarding time in half with a simple prompt change. I keep a list of "mind-blowing AI examples" and have to update it almost daily because things move so fast.

Trying to keep up is exhausting and in all truthfulness, any prediction beyond 90 days will leave one very embarrassed but I'll take the risk - here are some trends I am witnessing move too fast.

1. Forms will disappear from homepages

For the longest time, the form was non-negotiable. Demo request? Form. Pricing question? Form. Whitepaper download? Also a form. Name, email, job title, company size. Then wait. Sometimes a rep would get back to you in a few hours. Sometimes it took days. And in the meantime, you'd get dropped into a nurture sequence that usually assumed you knew nothing about the product.

But the people evaluating tools in 2025 don't look like that. They're showing up with more context, more urgency, and much higher expectations. They've already asked ChatGPT or Perplexity to compare their options. They've seen walkthroughs on YouTube. They've tried out a competitor's free plan. They don't want to wait two days for a BDR to email them back. They want to try the product. They want specific questions answered. And they want that to happen now.

Some companies are starting to use AI SDRs and tooling to drive agentic marketing on your webfront to make the form experience feel a little less static. These tools do a decent job of catching high-intent visitors and routing them to the right place, or popping up a chat experience that feels more tailored. But even then, it's mostly optimizing around the form—not replacing it.

And then there are a few who're removing forms altogether. Not hiding them behind modals. Actually removing them. They're replacing the form with a conversational AI that can answer product-specific questions in real-time, guide someone toward the right plan, and hand them off to a human only when it makes sense. It's not just a chatbot—it's a lightweight, contextual guide that can move someone through the first few steps of evaluation without asking for anything upfront.

One SaaS company I spoke with—a mid-market player in web automation—replaced their main demo form with a GPT-powered assistant trained on their onboarding data and help docs. Their lead volume dropped by 40%. But the qualified pipeline went up 70%. The people who didn't engage weren't serious. The ones who did converted faster, asked better questions, and didn't need as much hand-holding.

A lot of other companies are placing these agentic engagements as email or voice conversations beneath the form, so visitors fill the form and get into an email flow talking to an AI who helps them get started and answers questions around pricing, features, integrations, seats, etc. Most of the organizations offering transactional products/services do not realise that this approach of AI email engagement is actually worse than using a GPT-assistant right on the web as the customers just need to check pricing, features and other tactical questions which may be better served in real-time than via a back and forth email exchange.

The shift here isn't just about automation. It's about making sure your first touchpoint matches where the buyer already is. When someone arrives with that much intent and context, a static form feels like a delay tactic. And in a world where someone else offers them a smarter entry point, you might not get another shot.

That said, forms won’t be completely dead across all industries. Some sectors will maintain forms out of necessity rather than choice. Highly regulated fields like healthcare, where HIPAA compliance demands careful handling of information, will keep forms as verification checkpoints. Financial services, particularly for high-net-worth products, will still need qualifying barriers to filter out tire-kickers. Enterprise security software vendors might retain forms as part of their security theater – the logic being if you can't handle a form, you're not serious about security. But even in these cases, the smartest players are building conversational layers on top to make the form-filling experience less painful. The forms might stay, but they'll become the step after engagement, not before it

2. SDRs will shrink and more importantly their days will look very different

The idea that AI is going to "replace" SDRs is too simplistic. The role isn't disappearing—but it is changing fast. What used to be a high-volume, semi-scripted job is turning into something a lot more specialized.

In the old model, SDRs were responsible for volume. That was the entire point. You made your 100 calls, sent your 100 emails, chased the meeting. The best reps were the ones who could crank through the list with energy and bounce back from rejection. But most of that front-loaded work—finding leads, enriching data, tracking intent signals, running sequences, booking time—is now better handled by tools. A ton of teams are already doing this using Clay, Qualified, Apollo, Tactic, and a stack of GPT-based workflows.

So the question becomes: what's left for the human? Turns out, quite a bit—but it looks different.

Instead of focusing on volume, the SDR becomes more like a deal coordinator. Their job isn't to chase 200 strangers—it's to understand the 10 accounts that actually matter. They're figuring out how the buying committee is structured, what the internal politics look like, where the friction might show up, and what kind of narrative will actually land across functions. The meeting is often already booked. Their role is to make it stick.

The tooling is changing here too. Right now, most agentic workflows run 1:1—one agent talking to one contact. But the near future looks more like one agent per persona within an account. You've got one agent talking to the RevOps lead, another checking in with a security engineer, another nudging the product team. And the human SDR? They're managing the overlap. They're picking up on signals, resolving confusion, adding the nuance that the AI can't catch, yet.

They'll also play a bigger role in expansion and retention. Especially in land-and-expand models where the initial deal is small and the upside lives in usage growth. AI can alert you to usage spikes or login drops, but it still takes a person to follow up, see what's going on, and act with context.

So it's not that the SDR goes away. It's that the job moves up a level. Less brute force, more orchestration. Less activity tracking, more relationship management. The teams that figure this out early will be running leaner, more focused outbound programs—with better outcomes and fewer people.

3. Marketing websites will become hardcore interactive products

Most SaaS websites today still assume that the person visiting them knows nothing. They show everyone the same homepage: a headline about unlocking productivity, three vague benefits, some logos, and a CTA to book a demo or start a trial. If someone scrolls far enough, they might get a pricing table or a product walkthrough. And maybe, if they're lucky, a chatbot opens in the corner offering help.

But that experience doesn't reflect how people actually arrive anymore. The visitor might have seen your launch thread on X, or your integration on G2, or a teardown on Hacker News. They might be returning for the third time after sharing your pricing page internally. And they're still seeing the same generic homepage as someone discovering you for the first time.

This is going to feel increasingly dated. The shift that's coming—and in some cases already happening—is toward dynamic, personalized websites that behave more like real-time applications. Instead of routing people through static content and hoping something resonates, these new sites will adjust themselves based on who's visiting, where they came from, and what they're trying to do.

Lots of teams are already experimenting with this using tools like Qualified, which helps identify high-intent visitors and routes them into intelligent chat experiences. But what's coming next goes beyond that. It's not just changing the engagement layer—it's changing the experience layer.

A small adtech startup from India is building a lightweight engine that rewrites the homepage in real time based on visitor context. If someone from a Fortune 500 IP visits the pricing page twice in one week, the homepage changes to show volume-based pricing, an offer for enterprise onboarding, and a preloaded calendar link. If someone arrives from Reddit on mobile, they see a stripped-down version of the site with a demo video and a three-step setup flow. Same product, totally different experience.

What will disappear here is the idea that the marketing site is just a glorified brochure. By 2026, it'll feel weird to show the same version of your homepage to a junior engineer at a seed-stage startup and a VP of Operations at an S&P 500 company. Today, most of the personalization sits after the visitation - specific ABM or growth nurtures based on who visited and what they did on your website. But it will all move upstream to the point of visitation. We'll stop optimizing landing pages for conversion rates in isolation and start optimizing for journey continuity.

4. Seat-based pricing will break completely

Per-seat pricing has stuck around mostly because it's easy to explain and model. You sell 50 seats, you charge $50 a seat, great—you've got a neat little line item for finance and a nice multiplier for your valuation.

But this whole setup is starting to collapse. The buyer doesn't care how many people are logging in. They care what the product is doing for them. And in more and more cases, the product is doing a lot—with fewer people.

Automation is a big reason for this. Small teams are running massive workflows with barely any active users. You might have five people in the tool, but it's triggering dozens of actions every day, touching ops, finance, product, and customer success. When you ask that team to pay per seat, it feels like you're penalizing them for being efficient.

Even worse, per-seat pricing creates internal friction. I've heard teams say things like, "Let's not invite marketing yet—we'll have to pay for more seats," or "Let's wait until next quarter to roll this out to support." That's a bad place to be as a SaaS company. The thing you're selling becomes less valuable as it spreads. You end up discouraging usage.

Some companies have already moved. Workflow tools are charging per automation run. Analytics tools are charging per insight delivered. In both cases, customers don't blink—because it feels fair. Even if they end up paying more, it makes sense.

By 2026, I think most AI-native products—and plenty of others—will move to some form of usage-based or outcome-based pricing. Or at least hybrid models that combine access with activity. The pitch won't be "add more users." It'll be "get more done." And seat count just won't be the thing anyone anchors on anymore.

5. Search will get replaced by recommendation

This one's already in motion, but most SaaS teams haven't felt it yet. We're still operating as if discovery starts with search. You write blog posts. You build landing pages. You try to rank for "best API platform for fintech." You invest in SEO and hope someone clicks.

But discovery now increasingly starts with prompts. People are asking ChatGPT or Perplexity, "What's the easiest way to do approval workflows for remote teams?" or "Which CRM integrates best with Notion?" And they're getting answers—not links.

That shift changes everything. If your product isn't showing up in those answers, it's invisible. It doesn't matter how good your blog is if the model didn't get trained on your content or didn't consider it authoritative. And unlike SEO, you can't pay your way to the top of the response.

This changes how companies need to write. It's less about keywords and more about structure. Clear documentation, consistent naming, well-defined use cases. AI doesn't care about your brand tone. It cares if your product makes sense.

I think we'll also see new layers of recommendation emerge. Not just prompts, but passive discovery. Agents embedded in someone's workflow that say, "Hey, you're doing a lot of work in Sheets—do you want this automated?" Or "You keep sharing Notion links with your team. Want to auto-tag tasks from Slack?" This won't be ads. It'll be embedded logic that suggests tools at exactly the right moment.

What disappears here is the whole idea of top-of-funnel as a "capture" problem. You won't be fighting to get listed on G2 or gaming keyword density. You'll be trying to make your product legible to models and agents—because that's where the recommendation will come from.

6. Onboarding Will Become a Conversation

Most onboarding today still looks like a checklist. You get a tooltip that tells you what button to click, maybe a guide that explains how to create your first report. It's designed for the average user, which means it's usually kind of generic and kind of long.

But with AI in the loop, onboarding is starting to look more like a real conversation. You open the product and it asks, "What are you trying to do?" If you say "automate our weekly team report," it walks you through that exact setup. If you say "get alerts when a customer downgrades," it shows you a template and offers to plug in your Stripe data.

I know a SaaS company that rebuilt their onboarding this way, using a GPT-powered assistant as the front door. They ask three questions, then dynamically rewrite the interface—highlighting different sections, loading the right templates, and showing different documentation. Activation rates jumped from 60% to 88%. That's not just a better flow—it's a completely different experience.

What's going to disappear here is the idea that users will teach themselves. The default expectation will be: the product should understand what I want and help me get there. Anything that feels like work—or feels too generic—will quietly drive churn from day one.

7. Ghost Teams will become the norm - low headcount/more leverage

One of the things I keep noticing—often in the background of these other shifts—is that the teams doing the most interesting work right now are small. Not "scrappy startup" small. I mean structurally lean. Three to five people running products that feel like they should require 20. Founders who don't plan to hire a sales team. Engineers who are also running onboarding. Marketers who ship with Notion AI and a Loom walkthrough.

I talked to a founder recently who's running a $2M+ ARR SaaS business with zero employees. He uses GPT-4 for support, Jasper for content, Notion AI for docs, Zapier for ops, and a no-code builder to ship product updates. His burn is under $4K a month with a full stack subscription rollup. From the outside, the business looks like it has 15 people.

And this isn't a weird exception. It's becoming a pattern. People aren't scaling by hiring—they're scaling by stitching. Using AI to handle the parts of the business that used to require people. Not because they're cheap, but because they're fast. Because they don't need coordination meetings.

What disappears here is the assumption that growth equals headcount. Or that momentum needs to look like hiring. The teams that win in 2026 will look small from the outside but operate with a level of leverage that older companies just can't match.

What we’ll see in companies that are falling behind?

None of these changes are isolated. They compound. When your onboarding gets smarter, your support volume drops. When your homepage becomes a product, your form goes away. When your pricing matches usage, you expand faster. When your team is five people instead of fifty, you move faster by default.

So what disappears isn't just a set of tools or tactics. It's the entire layer of operational weight that companies used to treat as necessary. Static forms. Seat-based pricing. Manual support queues. Headcount as a proxy for progress. These things aren't being phased out slowly. They're being replaced—quietly and quickly—by teams who are already building in the new model.

If you're starting something now, you're not late. You're early to the next wave.

But only if you're willing to let go of what worked in the last one. If you’re hesitant, remember that there here are always two kinds of signals to decay: the lagging ones that show up too late to do anything about—flat revenue, churn creeping up, win rates falling. And the leading ones, which are quieter but far more useful - less about outcomes, more about behavior. How many times is AI used in your workflows. Does your team “prompt” to build content, or still operate with an agency. Does the VP at your firm post about ML and personalization completely unaware of what’s happening outside in real world? And worst of all—that VP is still waiting for "proof" that this shift is real, instead of looking around and seeing the teams that are already living in the new model.

The hard part here isn't the tech. It's letting go of the habits and heuristics that used to work. But the faster teams are already adapting. They're not just surviving—they're shipping faster, scaling smarter, and spending less time justifying their existence to the spreadsheet in finance.

And if you're reading this and seeing your own org in that list—it's not too late. But definitely time to move.