All posts tagged: SaaSpocalypse

Intuit is betting its 40 years of small business data can outlast the SaaSpocalypse

Intuit is betting its 40 years of small business data can outlast the SaaSpocalypse

Intuit has lost more than 40% of its market cap since the beginning of the year. It’s not alone. Many established SaaS players have seen their stock prices fall in recent months, including Adobe and IBM — the latter experiencing its most significant one-day drop (roughly $40 billion) with Anthropic’s announcement that Claude could now read, analyze and translate legacy COBOL into modern languages like Java and Python. The market has a name for it: the SaaSpocalypse. The argument from investors and market watchers: AI agents can now do bookkeeping, file taxes and reconcile accounts — without a human ever touching software. For instance, instead of a human using QuickBooks to categorize transactions, Claude Cowork can access financial data, apply tax logic and autonomously prepare documents. Rather than using TurboTax, agentic AI tools can handle complex tax logic and even file taxes. In lieu of QuickBooks, automated agents can handle multi-step bookkeeping tasks (like lining up receipts). Why investors are repricing SaaS Intuit has been among the hardest-hit, with its market capitalization now sitting at …

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: This isn’t our first SaaSpocalypse

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff: This isn’t our first SaaSpocalypse

Salesforce pulled out all the stops to convince investors that the AI revolution won’t be its death when it announced fourth-quarter earnings on Wednesday. Salesforce reported a solid quarter of $10.7 billion in revenue, up 13% year-over-year. For the year, it reported $41.5 billion in revenue, up 10% over the previous year, with both results boosted by its $8 billion acquisition of data management company Informatica last May. Net income landed at $7.46 billion, and the company offered strong guidance for the year ahead, projecting revenue of $45.8 billion to $46.2 billion — a 10% to 11% increase. It also said its “remaining performance obligation,” or RPO, is over $72 billion. That’s a figure that shows revenue under contact that has not yet been delivered or recognized as earned revenue. The numbers, though, could only do so much. Software-as-a-service stocks, with Salesforce as their poster child, have been getting hammered lately. Investors fear the rise of AI agents will undermine these companies, making their per-employee-seat business models obsolete. The situation has been dubbed the “SaaSpocalypse.” …