AI isn’t killing SaaS – it’s separating the winners from the rest

The headlines are loud right now. “SaaSpocalypse.” “AI replacing software.” “Everything is about to change.”

I get why it’s compelling. But I think it’s also missing the point. If you zoom out, what’s happening doesn’t look like collapse to me. It looks like a reset. A re-ranking. A moment where the market is starting to separate what creates value from what never really did.

And here’s the part I think people are missing. AI doesn’t level the playing field. It widens the gap. If AI were truly an equalizer, we’d expect to see incumbents getting wiped out overnight by faster, cheaper tools. But that’s not what’s happening. What I’m seeing, especially in legal tech, is that the strongest platforms are getting stronger.

The products that have real depth – embedded workflows, structured data, genuine customer value – are the ones that are benefiting most from AI. They’ve already done the hard work. AI just amplifies it.

On the other hand, products that were thinner to begin with – feature-led, easily replicable, or built without a deep understanding of the user – are finding it much harder to compete.

So, this isn’t a wipeout. It’s a sorting mechanism. And honestly, it’s one that’s probably overdue.

The end of “good enough”

For a long time, SaaS was fuelled by cheap capital and rapid expansion. You could build something “good enough,” add a few differentiators, and find a market. But that tolerance is disappearing.

Customers are asking questions now: Does AI do the lot? Does this make my work better? Does it save me time? Does it reduce risk? Can I build this myself?

In legal, those questions matter even more. There’s a lot of focus right now on LLMs and generative AI for content creation. And while that’s impressive, it’s not where most legal teams spend their time. Very few lawyers are sitting there thinking, “I need to create something from scratch.”

Most of the work is about reviewing, negotiating, managing, working with past templates and making decisions. It’s about process. It’s about workflow. It’s about moving things forward efficiently and consistently.

If we’re honest about where the real friction is, improving workflow and visibility across a team should be at the top of the list. That’s where AI can be genuinely useful. Not as a novelty. Not as a headline feature, but as something that removes friction and admin to allow for focus on the actual work.

That’s why I keep coming back to this: AI doesn’t replace software. It amplifies the products that are already helping to get the work done. If you have a platform, you have ways to understand how a legal team operates – you’ve got the data, the context, the workflows – and now AI can make that exponentially more powerful. It can surface insights faster, automate repetitive tasks, and support better decision-making.

But if you haven’t built that foundation, AI doesn’t magically fix it. We saw a wave of products land when generative AI first hit. A lot of them came to market quickly. Some of them proved interesting concepts. But if something can be built in a few weeks or months, it’s going to struggle to create long-term defensibility.

And that’s what we’re starting to see now. More consolidation. More M&A. More conversations about where real value lies and what actually lasts.

I don’t see that as a negative. It’s a natural part of how markets mature. Stronger platforms absorb useful ideas, talent, and capabilities, and build something more complete.

Build depth, not hype

The real question isn’t whether change is happening. It clearly is. The question is how you respond to it.

For legal leaders, I think there’s a real opportunity here to be more deliberate. To step back from the noise and focus on what matters most for their teams. What does “better” look like? Is it faster turnaround times? More consistency? Better visibility? Stronger risk management?

Technology should be evaluated against those outcomes, not against whatever the latest AI feature happens to be.

And for company founders and CEOs, the opportunity is even clearer. This isn’t the moment to chase the buzzword of the week or to sprinkle AI across a product and hope it sticks. That might get attention in the short term, but it won’t hold up. The real opportunity right now is to build something that genuinely creates value for the end user.

That means going deeper. Understanding the problem properly. Investing in workflows, data models, and user experience. Building something that becomes part of how your customer operates.

Because if AI is widening the gap, and I think it is, then the winners will be the ones who already have substance.

So, when I look at where SaaS and legal tech are heading, I don’t see collapse. I don’t see replacement. I see evolution. A shift away from surface-level features and towards real, embedded value. A shift from hype to substance. From “can we build this?” to “should this exist?”

For the right companies, and the right teams, that’s not something to be worried about. It’s something to lean into.

What does all this mean for lawyers? It’s a fair question – and probably the one that matters most. Because if AI is getting better at drafting, reviewing and summarizing, it’s easy to assume that the role of the lawyer starts to shrink.

I think the opposite is true. What’s changing isn’t the need for legal judgment – it’s where that judgment sits. The routine work that once filled a lawyer’s day is becoming faster, cheaper and, in some cases, automated. But that doesn’t diminish the role. It elevates it.

The real opportunity is to operate further up the chain. When you’re no longer buried in process, you can start to focus on what the business actually needs from legal: clarity, direction, and confident decision-making. You’re taking inputs from contracts, obligations, risks, and commercial context, and turning them into something far more valuable than a piece of work. You’re turning them into an answer.

That’s where AI becomes powerful. Not as a replacement for lawyers, but as a tool that helps surface the right data, faster, so that better decisions can be made.

And the lawyers who thrive in this next phase won’t be the ones who simply produce work more efficiently. They’ll be the ones who can connect the dots, apply judgment, and guide the business with confidence.

Because in the end, the value of legal has never been about the document. It’s about the decision.