The Success of SaaS and Signs of Its Decline
On January 28, 2026, the Nikkei newspaper website published an article titled "The Death of SaaS: AI Substitution Waves Hit Business Software; Four Companies Lose ÂĄ15 Trillion in Market Value."
The main points of the article are roughly as follows:
-
The stock prices of SaaS companies are declining due to concerns that AI will replace their services.
-
The combined market capitalization of four major companies—including Salesforce, Intuit, Adobe, and ServiceNow—decreased by ¥15 trillion in less than a month from the end of 2025.
-
Concerns are increasing that the users of software may shift from humans to AI, destabilizing existing business models.
-
The launch of the new service "Cowork" by the AI company Anthropic caused a sharp decline in the stock prices of these companies.
-
SaaS companies are also taking countermeasures, such as adding AI capabilities to their own software or partnering with startups that possess AI technologies.
As you may know, SaaS stands for Software as a Service. Instead of purchasing software outright, SaaS allows users to access software functions through the internet on a monthly or annual subscription basis.
SaaS vendors began to appear in the early 2000s. Salesforce, which provided CRM (Customer Relationship Management) through the cloud, became a pioneer of the SaaS model.