AI agents have been hunting in the lands of software giants for some time. The arrival of Claude Cowork promises to give them additional headaches… even causing their collapse?
Can the rise of agentic AI kill the software giants? This question has been hotly debated since the rise of generative AI, and the launch of Claude Cowork by Anthropic has just reignited the discussion.
Launched with a bang at the start of 2026, Claude Cowork is an autonomous virtual assistant, modeled on Claude Code, an assistance tool for developers with impressive performance which is already generating a billion dollars in turnover just six months after its launch. Anthropic also claims to have built Claude Cowork in less than two weeks, relying on Claude Code.
Unlike traditional chatbots, Claude Cowork can perform complex and advanced actions, such as editing a file on the user’s computer, performing office tasks, carrying out a search on the web or developing an application. The assistant’s ability to handle a wide range of different workloads revives the idea that AI could ultimately eliminate the need for specialized software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions, threatening the revenue and stock market valuation of a sector that has for years been a goose that lays the golden eggs. It represents “exactly the type of capabilities software investors fear,” in Bloomberg’s words.
How Agentic AI Threatens SaaS
Appearing during the 2000s, the SaaS wave rode on the promise of making organizations more efficient and agile by reducing their infrastructure costs and improving their ability to evolve and adapt quickly. The result was a small digital revolution which, coupled with the migration to the cloud, saw companies integrate more and more SaaS tools into their technology stack. In 2022, organizations managed on average 130 SaaS applications, a figure which can increase to several hundred tools for larger companies.
But the rise of agentic AI is beginning to call the supremacy of SaaS into question. For the first time, autonomous agents are capable not only of analyzing information, but also of interpreting it, making strategic decisions and actions in real time. Their emergence redefines the way in which organizations interact with the software itself and suggests a future where many SaaS solutions would become obsolete and could easily be replaced by AI agents like Claude Cowork.
Tomorrow, rather than using a CRM, teams in charge of customer relations could mobilize an AI agent managing the entire lead qualification cycle, automatically scanning emails and LinkedIn profiles to identify the best potential targets, helping to write personalized messages adapted to the context of each interlocutor, and scheduling appointments by scanning the different calendars automatically.
Same thing in HR. Rather than using software like Workday or BambooHR, professionals could tomorrow rely on an agent to automate the onboarding process for new employees, create the necessary IT accounts, assign mandatory training according to the position, schedule onboarding interviews and manage all administrative paperwork without any manual entry. Some claim that the cost of software development has already dropped by 90% thanks to AI agents.
Wall Street Alert
The possibilities are endless, and given the speed at which businesses have adopted these technologies, it’s little wonder that SaaS professionals are starting to sound the alarm.
“Some are starting to question the renewal quotes from large SaaS companies,” assures Martin Alderson, co-founder of the young AI startup CatchMetrics and specialist in the SaaS industry. “I’ve seen a few examples where a SaaS vendor quotes their usual double-digit annual price increase, and teams start to ask themselves, ‘Do we really need to pay for this, or could we just build what we need ourselves?’ A year ago, this would have been at best a hypothetical question with a quick conclusion: ‘no.’ Now it’s a real option with real thought put into it.”
Wall Street has started to take notice. SaaS stocks have fallen 15% since the start of the year and financial SaaS company Intuit, following the launch of Claude Cowork, has just had its worst week since 2022, where tech giants have ridden the AI wave to reach record valuations.
For Martin Alderson, software giants face less of a risk of immediate replacement than of a gradual loss of speed. “Many large SaaS companies have an NRR (net revenue retention rate, a measure of how much a company’s existing customers spend with it on an ongoing basis) significantly above 100%. This is the beauty of many SaaS business models: companies grow and require additional users or features to be added to their plan. These increases are usually very profitable. The SaaS provider does not need to spend a fortune on sales and marketing to get this increase, since it already has an established relationship with its customers.
This is where some SaaS companies are likely to be hit hard. Users will begin to migrate parts of the solution to self-built or modified internal platforms to avoid paying for the higher pricing tier.”
Can SaaS absorb generative AI?
Others, however, are skeptical about the threat that Claude Cowork and other agentic AI tools would pose to SaaS professionals. In a note published last week, Arjun Bhatia, expert in new technologies at William Blair, an investment firm, considers the market reaction to Anthropic’s latest release “exaggerated”. “Claude Cowork certainly blows a headwind on the software’s actions, but it does not constitute a fundamental danger for them,” he writes.
According to him, SaaS experts are in fact protected by the scale of their specialized data sets, on which they have the possibility of training their AI algorithms, the breadth of their platforms and the workflows that general agents cannot easily replicate. Furthermore, these players do not intend to sit idly by and are striving to quickly integrate their own AI assistants with their clients.
“The idea that agentic AI is going to replace SaaS seems wrong to me,” said Mike Kiersey, global vice president of Solution Consulting at Workato, a software platform for AI integration. “Agentic AI allows us to collaborate across systems in a way that wasn’t possible before, so we no longer need structured workflows. The core function of a SaaS remains essential for businesses, but the touchpoints through which a user interacts with the SaaS are completely overhauled by AI agents.”
Finally, SaaS professionals have also become experts in supporting companies on issues of compliance and compliance with regulations, obligations which will not disappear overnight and which constitute another ace up their sleeve.
