Generative AI primarily changes an app's user interface, but agentic AI can bypass UIs entirely to complete tasks. This makes transaction-fulfillment apps, which constitute a huge portion of the market, vulnerable to being replaced by agents that act directly on a user's behalf.
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When a user's goal is purely transactional (e.g., booking a flight), they have little loyalty to the app's UI. AI agents can directly fulfill these tasks, making such apps obsolete because their primary value is intermediation, not a unique, loyalty-building experience.
AI is becoming the new UI, allowing users to generate bespoke interfaces for specific workflows on the fly. This fundamentally threatens the core value proposition of many SaaS companies, which is essentially selling a complex UX built on a database. The entire ecosystem will need to adapt.
Organizations must urgently develop policies for AI agents, which take action on a user's behalf. This is not a future problem. Agents are already being integrated into common business tools like ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Salesforce, creating new risks that existing generative AI policies do not cover.
The "DoorDash Problem" posits that AI agents could reduce service platforms like Uber and Airbnb to mere commodity providers. By abstracting away the user interface, agents eliminate crucial revenue streams like ads, loyalty programs, and upsells. This shifts the customer relationship to the AI, eroding the core business model of the App Store economy's biggest winners.
Unlike traditional SaaS, AI applications have a unique vulnerability: a step-function improvement in an underlying model could render an app's entire workflow obsolete. What seems defensible today could become a native model feature tomorrow (the 'Jasper' risk).
The next phase of AI will involve autonomous agents communicating and transacting with each other online. This requires a strategic shift in marketing, sales, and e-commerce away from purely human-centric interaction models toward agent-to-agent commerce.
Similar to how mobile gave rise to the App Store, AI platforms like OpenAI and Perplexity will create their own ecosystems for discovering and using services. The next wave of winning startups will be those built to distribute through these new agent-based channels, while incumbents may be slow to adapt.
The paradigm shift with AI agents is from "tools to click buttons in" (like CRMs) to autonomous systems that work for you in the background. This is a new form of productivity, akin to delegating tasks to a team member rather than just using a better tool yourself.
The existential threat from large language models is greatest for apps that are essentially single-feature utilities (e.g., a keyword recommender). Complex SaaS products that solve a multifaceted "job to be done," like a CRM or error monitoring tool, are far less likely to be fully replaced.
The future of AI is not just humans talking to AI, but a world where personal agents communicate directly with business agents (e.g., your agent negotiating a loan with a bank's agent). This will necessitate new communication protocols and guardrails, creating a societal transformation comparable to the early internet.
