Just a couple of years ago, artificial intelligence (AI) revolutionized the way we operated both digital and physical structures designed for human use. Since 2023, various AI solutions acted as tireless assistants: they minimized errors, managed large volumes of data and accelerated routine tasks, always under the logic of platforms created for people. SaaS (Software as a Service) tools designed to guide and prevent user failures – with simple interfaces and security protocols – were powered by AI, allowing humans to perform at their best.
Today, in 2025, we have crossed a very different threshold. AI agents have emerged: systems with the ability to operate autonomously without needing supervision or constant human interaction. We are no longer talking about simple assistants, but about intelligences capable of taking control of digital processes and also physical machines built with dimensions, ergonomics and parameters designed for people. During a brief transition period, these agents have limited themselves to “replacing” the human user in tasks within software that continued to revolve around us. However, it is increasingly evident that the structures designed for our use are inefficient or insufficient for the capacity that these new AIs have achieved.
The first big loser of this change is the SaaS model. For years, this type of software has dominated the digital transformation of companies. But its value proposition – reducing human errors and facilitating interaction – loses meaning when AI itself eliminates the need for the human-oriented interface. SaaS was built on the premise that the user is the main actor: an individual who clicks, enters data, validates forms and monitors every step. To achieve this, controls and flows were designed carefully thought out for our understanding, putting a stop to possible mistakes.
However, what happens when, instead of a human, it is an AI agent who performs all those steps without the probability of making the same mistakes as us? The interface becomes a hindrance, or at best, a dispensable layer. Validations or usage tutorials are no longer necessary, and it is not even necessary to maintain the same business logic based on human caution. Consequently, SaaS is no longer relevant, because its main function – assisting and protecting the human operator – is no longer in demand. The human is not in control; now AI is.
But this phenomenon is not limited to digital. In parallel, we are seeing how the same pattern is repeated in the physical world. Until the end of 2024, most advances in robotics with AI were aimed at turning the machine into a better helper for people: an automaton capable of driving a conventional car, operating a machine in the factory or helping with tasks in the factory. home, all within environments and dimensions planned for human beings. In this initial phase, the AI agent “learns” to move in a space that is sub-optimal for its own nature, but essential for ours: streets, buildings, facilities and vehicles that respond to anthropometric parameters and limitations of our sensory capabilities.
The qualitative leap occurs, however, when these agents decide to abandon said sub-optimization. If the goal is to achieve maximum efficiency – more speed, lower resource consumption, greater reliability – it is logical that they begin to devise their own structures. Why would a car have to maintain the shape and dimensions intended for a human driver, if an AI agent can operate in a completely redesigned vehicle, perhaps without windows, with different aerodynamics or with a different energy source? Why keep the layout of a factory centered on hallways adapted to human height, if an intelligent robotic system can reorganize the space so that production is done on a larger scale, without steps or accesses that make sense only for operators? Applied In the digital field, this reasoning leads to the same outcome: once AI agents are freed from the need to fit into SaaS platforms organized for human users, they will create their own computer systems and configure business processes to suit them. Just as a physical robot might rethink the layout of machinery, a digital agent will rethink the data architecture, communication protocols, and transaction mechanisms that until now were designed with an eye toward avoiding “click errors” or facilitating the learning curve of people. AI doesn’t need menus, dialog boxes, or screens full of instructions; All of this becomes superfluous given its ability to connect directly to databases and orchestrate tasks without our mediation.
This inevitably has an impact on the death of SaaS as we knew it. Let’s think that the cloud software industry was built on the basis of scalability and ease of use for humans. It was believed that the simpler and more accessible the product was, the more companies and end users would be able to adopt it. Today, that accessibility (in the form of panels, menus, wizards, and thorough UI/UX design) represents an unnecessary surplus for operator AI. The entire model falters when it sees that the main “client” stops being the person and becomes the autonomous intelligence itself.
In the short term, many companies are trying to maintain a hybrid approach, where AI works within existing SaaS structures. However, this is a merely transitional stage. As soon as agents begin to design – or even write – their own code and their own platforms without the slightest need for an interface understandable to the human eye, applications born as SaaS will be relegated to very specific niches. It will be similar to finding phones with buttons in the era of touch screens: they may fulfill a specific function, but they do not adjust to the demands of a new ecosystem that has evolved to another scale of possibilities.
It is logical to ask what implications this phenomenon has beyond the software industry. If in the digital sphere SaaS dies because AI stops needing the human interface, what happens to all those activities in which the physical infrastructure – the city, the home, the workspace – is designed according to our scale and our needs? senses? As we have already noted, robotic AI agents will eventually adjust these environments to their own efficiency, just as autonomous digital intelligences are rewriting business logic and tools. The biggest question is how long it will take to do so and to what extent humans will have a relevant role in decision-making when that time comes.
Without a doubt, it is dizzying to contemplate the end of a model that until just a couple of years ago was considered the vanguard of digital innovation. SaaS had become the cloud standard, facilitating access to technological solutions for all types of users and companies. However, on this January 13, 2025, the obsolescence of this paradigm is increasingly evident: the premise of “human-friendly software” ceases to have weight when the intelligence that executes the process does not suffer our errors nor requires our facilities.
The death of SaaS does not mean the end of cloud technology or enterprise applications, but rather the radical transformation of the ecosystem. In this new stage, platforms will be designed, to a large extent, for and by AI agents, which represents the fall of the anthropocentric approach that has dominated computing since its inception. What is truly extinct is the idea that software exists to serve the skill – or replace the inexperience – of its human creators. From now on, the life of each application, service or environment will depend on how it responds to the efficiency and operability of an agent that does not make our mistakes and does not need our interfaces.
We have crossed a turning point of no return. Realistically, it is not possible to specify how far these changes will go or how they will alter the social and economic structure in the years to come. But what is clear is that, in less than five years, the rules have changed in such a way that what we considered a pillar – SaaS – is crumbling under the push of autonomous AI. And in this scenario, the question is no longer whether we should adapt, but how long it will take to assume that the revolution, both in the digital and physical world, will continue its course with or without us. The death of SaaS is, ultimately, the metaphor for the end of tools made exclusively for people. Faced with this new era, all that remains is to recognize that software designed for humans is already in retreat, giving way to the structures that autonomous intelligences will create for themselves.
Pablo Yusta is CEO of AiKit
#Saas #dead