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Notes from the Frontier · AI strategy · data

SaaS isn't dying. Renting is.

AI agents are starting to do the task themselves, straight through to the finish, without anyone touching a login screen. That does not kill software subscriptions. It changes what any contract has to hand you from day one.

Joe Mullane, Director of Divergent Thinking · · about 2 minutes to read

A row of small boxes floating under a dashed line, next to one larger box sitting on solid ground with a key at its centre and data tiles held inside it

Software as a service is not dying. Renting it blind is.

For twenty years the deal was simple. Pay every month, log in, click through someone else’s screens, and your information sits wherever they decided to put it. That worked while a person had to be the one doing the clicking.

Why the renting model is breaking

An agent does not need your dashboard. It needs your data, and a way to act on it. Once a machine can pull the numbers, write the update and finish the job on its own, the screen you were renting stops earning its subscription. You were never paying for the task. You were paying for the click-through that got a person to it.

Take a booking system. Today someone opens it, checks the diary, sends a confirmation. Soon an agent does that whole chain itself, straight from a phone message to a confirmed table, no one touching the login screen at all. If that booking system will not hand your bookings out in a format the agent can read, you are still paying full price for a screen nobody uses any more.

That is the bit dying. Not the software. The rented middleman standing between you and your own information.

Ownership is the new deal

None of this means stop buying software. It means stop signing for software you cannot leave. From here, any new contract states on day one that the data is yours, in your format, out on demand, no ticket, no six-week wait.

Own the process as well as the data. If a supplier’s roadmap decides when your business is allowed to change, you do not own the process, they do. Keep the right to change it yourself, whatever the supplier ships next.

Check what you already signed

Most of the contracts you are in today were signed before any of this mattered. So go back through every current supplier and check two things. Can we get our data out. Can we act on it without waiting on them.

Where the answer is no, that is not a reason to panic. It is a reason to fix it before the renewal date, either by renegotiating the contract or by planning your way out of it.

What leaders should do next

  • Before signing any new software contract, get “our data, in our format, out on demand” written into the agreement, not promised in a sales call.
  • Pull out every current supplier contract and check it against that same bar. Flag the ones that fail.
  • Ask each supplier one straight question: if we left tomorrow, do we walk out with our own data intact, or with nothing.
  • Stop scoring software on its features. Score it on whether an agent, yours, could pick up the task and finish it without asking anyone’s permission.