Intuit has lost more than 40% of its market cap since the beginning of the year. It is not alone. Many established SaaS players have seen their stock prices decline in recent months, including Adobe and IBM – the latter experienced its most significant one-day decline (about $40 billion) with Anthropic announcing that the cloud can now read, analyze and translate legacy COBOL into modern languages like Java and Python. The market has a name: SaaSpocalypse.
Investors and market watchers argue: AI agents can now keep bookkeeping, file taxes and reconcile accounts – without any human software. For example, instead of a human using QuickBooks to categorize transactions, cloud cowork can access financial data, apply tax logic and prepare documents autonomously. Instead of using TurboTax, agentic AI tools can handle complex tax logic and even file the taxes. In lieu of QuickBooks, automated agents can handle multi-step bookkeeping tasks (such as submitting receipts).
Why Are Investors Reevaluating SaaS?
Intuit has been one of the most affected with this Market capitalization now stands at around $106 billion.
The catalyst has been the emergence of fully agentic, no-code AI assistants such as cloud peer And open-source tools like OpenClaw, whose founder was recently acquired by OpenAI. The fear is that these cheaper service-as-a-service offerings (or service-as-software, or results-as-a-service, depending on who you ask) will outpace pay-per-seat subscriptions; While traditional SaaS provides users with a tool (software) to complete the task, SaaS-as-a-Service provides fully automated results.
For example, Anthropic’s cowork platform includes finance capabilities Which allows the agent to read financial files and transform them into structured models, tables and reports.
“The advantage is that I’m removing the complexity of my business operations,” said Brian Jackson, principal research director (as he likes to call it) of the Info-Tech Research Group. "Software as a Service"). “Hearing about a model where you only pay when you get the results you want is very appealing.”
This emerging capability is consistent with past technological advances, he pointed out: IT departments used to be in charge of running infrastructure, but cloud computing eliminated that management. Then, SaaS tools emerged to orchestrate the application layer. Now users manage their work within SaaS apps – inputting data, filling out forms, creating analytics dashboards.
“So the next step is automated intelligence,” Jackson said. “Instead of having people do that work, we’ll just have AI do that work.” Essentially, it can become a headless system without a UI; Users just let it run and don’t think about it.
He said this new concept comes at a time when enterprises are getting fed up with the SaaS business model. Lock-in is frustrating, fees are increasing, seats are increasing, and “it has become a burdensome operating cost,” Jackson said. “And it doesn’t always guarantee increasing value, it doesn’t guarantee ROI at all.”
Why was Intuit hit the hardest?
Intuit, founded in 1983, now serves nearly 100 million customers with a suite of products that, in addition to QuickBooks and TurboTax, include Mailchimp and Credit Karma. But these core offerings are now considered low-hanging fruit for AI, potentially jeopardizing a company whose revenue model relies heavily on per-seat/per-user subscriptions.
Intuit CEO Sasson Goodarzi recently distanced himself from claims of a data “datapocalypse.”most important gapIn the Semaphore interview.
Mariana Tessel, EVP and GM of Intuit’s small business group, takes a similar stance. Yes, cloud cowork and similar agentic tools are “robust” tools, he said, but Intuit has “consistent” and “sustainable” advantages.
Specifically: first-party data. Customers generate a variety of data on Intuit’s systems, whether by creating invoices, importing ledgers or executing various finance projects. Then there’s third-party data, generated through Intuit’s connections with more than 24,000 banks, e-commerce sites and other entities, Tessel pointed out.
He argued that AI agents do not have access to this “vastness” of data. Additionally, Intuit knows how to organize and use data, such as linking together information across customer segments to provide a market snapshot. Tessel argued, “We understand this data, we know how to turn it into action.”
They also doubled down on Intuit’s deep understanding of its customers. Instead of a chatbot that can process and implement numbers and statistics, “we know what small businesses face,” he said, whether it’s their concerns about bookkeeping and payroll, or their struggles with hiring.
“We’ve been in business for over 40 years,” Tessel said. “We have a lot of information that is very specific.”
Other SaaS companies stand firmly behind this argument. John Aniano, Zendesk’s SVP of product and CRM applications, points out that his company serves 80,000 customers and deeply understands their needs. “We really see [general purpose agentic tools] are at a disadvantage because they have to go customer by customer and learn the things we have learned over the course of 20 years,” he said at a recent VentureBeat event.
Info-Tech’s Jackson said the data dispute argument stands. He also pointed out that, realistically, the SaaS market is is expected to increase at a “very good clip” in the coming years. “Could this change very quickly? It’s possible, but not likely,” he said.
Plus, SaaS is so ingrained in modern business, and trying something completely new can be a challenge. Jackson said that even disruptive and compelling technologies like AI may take time to deploy at scale as enterprises have to remodel their workflows.
“You have workers in place. You have departments in place. It just takes effort and time to change the processes and expectations associated with these things,” he said, though “the hunger will definitely be there.”
How Intuit is betting on what agents can’t replicate
To get ahead of this, Intuit recently signed a multi-year partnership with Anthropic to bring AI agents to mid-market businesses. Using Anthropic’s Cloud Agent SDK on the Intuit platform, enterprises will be able to create and customize agents. On the other hand, Intuit’s tools can be exposed directly inside Anthropic products like Cowork, Cloud for Enterprise, and Cloud.AI through Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration with TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp.
This builds on Intuit’s previous rollout Intuit IntelligenceThat includes specialized AI agents for sales, tax, payroll, accounting, and project management. Users can query and interact with their financial data in natural language, automate tasks, and generate dynamic reports or KPI scorecards.
“They have the data, they have the interface, and now they’re offering themselves as an orchestration layer,” Jackson said of such moves by larger SaaS players. “We can be the place where you create your agents and manage them.”
At this point, Tessel calls Intuit “a well-run company” that can respond rapidly. His team tracks the progress of orchestration, reads academic papers and is “constantly learning” about new technologies. “We’re on it,” she said.
Ultimately, companies must be “aware and aware now,” he stressed. As she said: “What’s the day pivot? How many times have you pivoted? Are you experimenting?”
Zendesk’s Aniano agreed that there are “cool new ways to develop software”, and admitted that he spends 90 to 120 minutes of his day “living” inside cloud code. Companies that can “make the mind shift” into software creation in new ways can create a level playing field between incumbents and startups.
One thing that will be interesting to see, Jackson said, is how quickly SaaS providers introduce MCP plugins or build their own into their software suites. “How good will these SaaS providers be at supporting AI interoperability?” He said. “And in what ways will they try to create friction or make it harder for enterprises to abandon their interface?”
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