Who Needs SaaS When You Have AI Agents? A Business Model Shift

Upwork, but instead of freelancers, you hire AI Agents. This is happening.

Author

Sebastian Muehl
February 27, 2025

The more I dig into AI Agents, the more obsessed I am becoming. I started to see possibilities everywhere — I see an entirely new economy forming.

Then it hit me. A shower thought.

How will companies actually get access to these agents? How will agent builders find demand? The obvious answer: Marketplaces.

I am thinking Upwork but you don’t hire humans for the job, you hire AI Agents. They do the work, get reviewed, and their creators get paid.

In my view, this outcome is inevitable. But there is much more to it… I think it will change the nature of software-as-a-service (SaaS) itself.

Let’s dive in.

💡AI Agent Marketplaces, aka The End of SaaS

Who here buys software because they love looking at dashboards? And who here buys software to get results? Yeah, no need for a survey.

  • Traditional SaaS shows us all the data we want. Beautiful dashboards. We look at them, make the decisions, and do the work.

  • Example: Lead generation. We pay for the software to show us where we loose our leads. We have to make the adjustments ourselves to get the result.

  • It’s good, not great. We pay for the tool, not the outcome.

What if we could pay for the outcome instead of the tools, like automatically Increasing my lead conversion by 5%?

And here is my billion $$$ shower thought…

“Where does that matchmaking happen? In a marketplace. A marketplace for AI Agents.”

Think Upwork, but instead of hiring people you hire AI Agents.

Other users review agents, so you know which ones work well.

Businesses request agents for specific needs, and different developers can compete for the deal.

The marketplace offers deployment, compute and billing. Making it possible for creators to create and host AI agents without having to rent million dollar equipment.

Why this changes everything:

  • No more subscriptions for tools where you utilize half the features (at best).

  • Billing is precise — no more overpaying for freelancers that fleece you.

  • Outcome-based payment - measuring ROI was never this easy

The pitch deck writes itself…. actually, it could — if I had an AI Agent for that.

Here is what I don’t like about it:

As always, I am early, but I am not the first to think about it. So I did my research.

AI agent marketplaces are just now emerging — some launched this week, others are in alpha or beta. You can see how early we are — here are a few of the contenders:

Launched from alpha this week.

AI agents that can integrate with existing SaaS platforms.

Find or create AI Agents that you can rent out or sell.

Looking at these one thing is clear: we’re in the early wild west phase of AI agent marketplaces. There is no dominant platform yet, and it’s still hard to evaluate the quality of platform and the agents that are offered. The supply side is still thin. Right now, searching for agents feels like reviewing houses on early AirBnB. You see a dark, blurry photo of a bed and the listing has no reviews… it’s hard to tell the quality.

For these platforms, just like for any marketplace, to scale, they need to solve a few core problems:

  • Generate Trust - Can customers rely on an AI agent to deliver results?

  • Offer Verification - How can marketplaces ensure they agents they offer are secure, effective, and safe?

  • Enable Interoperability - Agents should work across services - and even with other agents.

It’s all solvable. And when it is solved, the software industry is in for a shakeup.

What Does This Mean?

I couldn't be more convinced this is not just a new cool AI trend. This is a fundamental shift in how businesses will buy software.

SaaS companies make billions selling tools. But the catch: those tools only deliver value if businesses put in the work.

Wouldn’t they prefer to buy the outcome instead?

Why would businesses keep paying for software licenses if agents delivered the work end-to-end?

Traditional SaaS companies that don’t evolve into an agent-driven model will lose.

Let’s make the impact feel even more real and inevitable. Here are three big SaaS providers we all know:

  • Adobe - Revenue: $19.4 billion, Market Cap: $250.9 billion - Design Tools

  • Salesforce - Revenue: $34.8 billion, Market Cap: $244.6 billion - Sales Tools

  • Intuit - Revenue: $15 billion, Market Cap: $181.8 billion - Financial Tools

They sell tools. If the future is outcomes, their business models must change — or risk becoming obsolete. Salesforce is already building Agentforce because they know.

It’s not just about AI. It’s about the future of software.

What’s your take? Am I completely off here, or is there a future for AI agent marketplaces? Please let me know if and how you already use AI agents to complete end-to-end workflows for you.

Have a great rest of the week,

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