Intuit has lost around a third of its market cap since the beginning of the year. It’s not alone. Many established SaaS players have seen their stock prices fall in recent months, including Adobe and IBM — the latter experiencing its most significant one-day drop (roughly $40 billion) with Anthropic’s announcement that Claude could now read, analyze and translate legacy COBOL into modern languages like Java and Python. The market has a name for it: the SaaSpocalypse.
The argument from investors and market watchers: AI agents can now do bookkeeping, file taxes and reconcile accounts — without a human ever touching software. For instance, instead of a human using QuickBooks to categorize transactions, Claude Cowork can access financial data, apply tax logic and autonomously prepare documents. Rather than using TurboTax, agentic AI tools can handle complex tax logic and even file taxes. In lieu of QuickBooks, automated agents can handle multi-step bookkeeping tasks (like lining up receipts).
Why investors are repricing SaaS
Intuit has been among the hardest-hit, with its market capitalization now sitting at around $114 billion.
The catalyst has been the emergence of fully agentic, no-code AI assistants like Claude Cowork and open-source tools like OpenClaw, whose founder was recently acqui-hired by OpenAI. Fears are that these cheaper service-as-a-service offerings (or service-as-software, or results-as-a-service, depending on who you ask) will upend pay-per-seat subscriptions; whereas traditional SaaS delivers a tool (software) for users to complete a task, service-as-a-service delivers a fully-automated outcome.
For instance, Anthropic’s Cowork platform includes finance capabilities that allow the agent to read financial files and turn them into structured models, tables, and reports.
“The advantage is that I am abstracting away the complexity of my business operations,” said Brian Jackson, principal research director at Info-Tech Research Group (who prefers to call it “service-as-software”). “To hear about a model where you only pay when you get the outcome that you want, that’s very appealing.”
This emerging capability is in line with past technological advancements, he pointed out: IT departments used to be in charge of running infrastructure, but cloud computing came along to abstract away that management. Then, SaaS tools emerged to orchestrate the application layer. Now users manage their work — inputting data, filling out forms, creating analytics dashboards — within SaaS apps.
“So the next step is automated intelligence,” Jackson said. “Instead of having people do those things, we’ll just have AI do them.” Essentially, it could become a headless system without a UI; users simply let it run and don’t think about it.
This new concept comes at a time when enterprises are becoming fed up with the SaaS business model, he noted. Lock-in is frustrating, fees continue to go up, seats expand, and “it becomes this unwieldy operating cost,” Jackson said. “And it’s not always guaranteed to drive value, it doesn’t guarantee ROI at all.”
Why Intuit got hit the hardest
Intuit, which was founded in 1983, now serves around 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 endangering the company whose revenue model relies heavily on per-seat/per-user subscriptions.
Intuit’s CEO Sasan Goodarzi has recently shrugged off SaaSpocalypse claims, calling data the “most important moat” in a Semafor interview.
Marianna Tessel, EVP and GM for Intuit’s small business group, takes the same stance. Yes, Claude Cowork and similar agentic tools are “robust” tools, she noted, but Intuit has “persistent” and “durable” advantages.
Notably: First-party data. Customers generate various types of data on Intuit’s systems, whether it’s by creating an invoice, importing ledgers or performing various finance projects. Then there’s third-party data, which is generated through Intuit’s connections with 24,000-plus banks, e-commerce sites, and other entities, Tessel pointed out.
AI agents simply do not have access to this “vastness” of data, she contended. Further, Intuit knows how to organize and use data, such as stitching together information across customer segments to provide market snapshots. “We understand this data, we know how to turn it into action,” Tessel argued.
She also doubled down on Intuit’s deep understanding of its customers. Rather than a chatbot that can process and act on numbers and figures, “we know what small businesses face,” she said, whether it’s their concerns around bookkeeping and payroll, or their struggles with hiring.
“We’ve been in business for over 40 years,” Tessel noted. “We have a lot of know-how that is very specific.”
Other SaaS companies stand staunchly behind this argument. Jon Aniano, Zendesk’s SVP of product and CRM applications, pointed out that his company serves 80,000 customers and deeply understands their needs.
“We actually see [general-purpose agentic tools] at a disadvantage because they’ve gotta go customer by customer and learn things that we’ve learned over the course of 20 years,” he said at a recent VentureBeat event.
The data moat argument does hold up, noted Info-Tech’s Jackson. He also pointed out that, realistically, the SaaS market is projected to grow at a “pretty good clip” in the years ahead. “Could that change very quickly? It’s possible, but it’s unlikely,” he said.
Also, SaaS is so entrenched in modern business, and pivoting to something entirely new can be a challenge. Even disruptive and compelling technologies like AI can take time to deploy at scale because enterprises have to recraft their workflows, Jackson noted.
“You have workers in place. You have departments in place. It just takes effort and time to change the processes and the expectations around these things,” he said, although “the appetite 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 Claude Agent SDK on the Intuit platform, enterprises will be able to build and customize agents. On the other end, Intuit’s tools can be surfaced directly inside Anthropic products such as Cowork, Claude for Enterprise, and Claude.ai through Model Context Protocol (MCP) integrations with TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks, and Mailchimp.
This builds on Intuit’s previous rollout of Intuit Intelligence, which features specialized AI agents for sales, tax, payroll, accounting, and project management.
In today’s digital age, users have the ability to effortlessly access and engage with their financial information using natural language, automate various tasks, and generate dynamic reports or KPI scorecards. This seamless interaction is made possible through the emergence of an orchestration layer within large Software as a Service (SaaS) companies. According to Jackson, these companies now serve as a hub where individuals can build and manage their agents effectively.
Intuit, a well-established company in the industry, is praised for its agility and ability to adapt quickly to advancements in orchestration technology. Tessel, a member of the Intuit team, highlights the importance of staying informed about new technologies and constantly learning to remain competitive in the market.
In the fast-paced business landscape of today, companies are urged to stay vigilant and adaptable. Tessel emphasizes the need for businesses to be awake and aware of the ever-changing market dynamics. The ability to pivot quickly and experiment with new strategies is crucial for survival and success.
Aniano from Zendesk acknowledges the shift towards innovative software development methods and the significance of embracing new approaches. By leveraging tools like Claude Code, companies can level the playing field between traditional incumbents and agile startups.
Looking ahead, the integration of MCP plugins by SaaS providers and the potential development of their own AI capabilities within their software suites pose an interesting prospect. Jackson raises questions about the extent to which SaaS providers will support AI interoperability and the strategies they may employ to retain customers and discourage them from switching interfaces.
As the market continues to evolve, it is essential for companies to stay informed and adaptable to remain competitive. By embracing new technologies and methodologies, businesses can position themselves for success in a rapidly changing landscape.
Editor’s note: This article has been revised to reflect the current market cap decline of approximately 33% year-to-date for Intuit.
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