SaaS Still Has a Moat. Just Not the One We Think.
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SaaS Still Has a Moat. Just Not the One We Think.<br>SaaS’s real moat is learned behavior, not locked-up data. That buys incumbents time—but agentic context layers are already beginning to dismantle it.
Charlie Graham<br>Jul 15, 2026
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When I consult with companies trying to become AI-first through Second Coffee, I keep seeing the same pattern.<br>They want agents. They want a company brain that knows everything without anyone copying and pasting. They want their data connected across the whole stack.<br>Thanks for reading In The AIrena! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
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But they are not ready to get rid of their SaaS.<br>That observation has changed how I think about SaaS moats and whether they are going away.<br>For years, everyone assumed the moat was data.<br>Salesforce owned your customer data, sales history, pipeline records, reporting structures, permissions, automations, and years of institutional memory. Getting that data out was painful. Switching meant migration risk, broken integrations, months of retraining, and a lot of organizational pain.<br>Same for HubSpot, Workday, Zendesk, Airtable, SharePoint, Notion, and the rest of the stack. Each one sat on top of a pile of data your company couldn’t easily move. The data was the lock-in.
That moat is weakening. And something more interesting is taking its place.<br>The Real Moat Is the Habit
The data moat was real. But it was never the only thing keeping companies from switching.<br>SaaS’s true moat is the daily habit of using the UX.<br>Millions of salespeople have been trained to use Salesforce daily. Teams have built dashboards, custom fields, permission structures, and reporting workflows inside it that they use frequently. Managers know where to look. Sales reps know what to update. Integrators have spent years perfecting the Salesforce integrations.<br>And it’s not just Salesforce. Ops teams know which Airtable view matters for Monday morning. Customer Success teams have been trained and optimized to use ZenDesk. Each of these people are so familiar with their apps’ UI that they no longer even think when using them. Learning a new tool would force them to start all over.<br>Even more - once SaaS has been integrated with custom workflows, it becomes a matter of pride. Small teams building on top of Airtable or Notion often have something close to the IKEA effect: they built the workflow themselves, so they trust it and take pride in it. Even an imperfect interface becomes comfortable because it structures how work actually gets done.<br>Every department wants its SaaS to be the system of record. CS wants the CS platform. Engineering wants the product database. Sales wants the CRM. Marketing wants the marketing SaaS. No one voluntarily hands their system over to a replacement they didn’t choose.<br>A new AI-native tool may have a genuinely better interface -- more agentic, with dashboards that build themselves, a chat interface that can accurately answer any question about the business, and automations that do half the work before anyone asks. But adopting it means retraining employees, rebuilding dashboards, recreating permissions, migrating custom fields, and convincing every team the pain is worth it.<br>People complain about Salesforce constantly. But what they usually want isn’t a replacement. They want Salesforce to be more powerful with more data and also be less annoying to use. They will therefore not give up Salesforce without a huge amount of friction and feet-dragging.<br>People in the company who have optimized their own workflows based on the SaaS UI don’t want it to. And honestly management would not be happy either as in the short and medium turn, it would likely cause a reduction in productivity instead of an increase.<br>Big SaaS has a strong foothold right now, and it will last longer than people think.<br>While safe for now, the future does not look bright for SaaS
While SaaS has a strong foothold with UX and habit, real headwinds are coming that will limit its growth and eventually cause a reshaping of the industry.<br>They will not dent SaaS revenue right now, but they will materially impact it in the coming years. Here are five headwinds that will diminish their dominance.<br>1. AI is forcing data to become portable. Companies are starting to deploy AI to help with sales, support, marketing, and data analysis. To be successful, this AI needs context across the whole stack -- not just one system. That’s creating pressure for SaaS companies to build out APIs, CLIs, and MCPs -- ways for agents to access and manipulate their data without needing a human in the loop. SaaS vendors that don’t open up will get routed around. SaaS vendors that do open up make their data easier to extract -- drastically lowering the data moat.<br>2. Agent-to-agent makes human UX less relevant. As more work gets done by AI agents talking to other AI agents, the beautiful human...