Why AI Won't Kill SaaS

AI makes building software easier than ever. Many predict this will kill SaaS. Why pay for something you can build yourself?

This prediction has the causality backwards.

Building was never the hard part. The hard part is maintaining, supporting, evolving, and staying focused on what you built. AI lowers the cost of creation. It does not lower the cost of ongoing attention.

As Bezos’ adage goes: do what makes your beer taste better. Everything else is a distraction disguised as capability. Just because you can build something does not mean you should.

Every internal tool competes for organizational attention. Internal tools never stay done. They accumulate feature requests, bugs, edge cases, integration demands. Each one becomes a small gravitational well pulling focus away from your actual product.

This is the attention tax. You pay it not in dollars but in cognitive load, context switching, and the slow erosion of priorities.

SaaS is specialization made accessible. When you subscribe to a tool, you rent the result of someone else’s full attention on a problem you do not want to own. The alternative is building shallow versions of deep tools and maintaining them forever.

SaaS vendors can go deeper because it is their only focus. They serve thousands of customers and learn from all of them. Your internal tool serves one customer and learns slowly. The depth gap compounds over time.

Here is the paradox: the easier it becomes to build, the more important it is to not build.

Easy building means more distractions, not fewer. Every new capability is a new temptation. Every temptation indulged is attention spent on something that is not your core work.

Discipline becomes more valuable when capability is abundant. The organizations that thrive will be the ones who refuse to build what they can buy. They will point their newfound building capacity at things only they can build. The unique. The differentiating. The things that make their beer taste better.

AI does not kill SaaS. It makes the case for SaaS stronger.

The future belongs to those who understand a simple truth: the ability to build everything is not an invitation to build everything. It is permission to be even more selective about what deserves your attention.