SaaS survived, but AI stole its budget: only ~20% of AI spend is net new
AccBalanced · x · 2026-09-06
Jason Lemkin's post-mortem on the 2026 "SaaSpocalypse": Anthropic and OpenAI didn't kill SaaS via vibe coding, but AI stole its budget.
- Early in the year, markets decided AI would eat B2B software, wiping roughly $2 trillion in market cap before an uneven recovery.
- Companies that embraced AI and agentic workflows — Datadog, Snowflake, Databricks, GitLab, Twilio, Atlassian — got accelerated instead.
- Those that didn't saw CIOs raid SaaS budgets to fund AI. Only about 20% of AI spend is net new; the rest comes from existing software budgets.
Related event: SaaS Not Dead but Budgets Squeezed as Market Rebounds After $2T Wipeout(2 posts)→
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