The future of SaaS is headless
Many software-as-a-service companies have been built almost entirely on implementation complexity. I've worked for a couple of them and the moat was the difficulty of building and scaling the system. One of them even believed that we should not try to be a database, that we were a "system of action". But we were technically competent and we out-executed the competition (at least in the early days), so for a while we had success.
Today, these types of companies are dead (or dying). LLMs have killed the implementation complexity moat. Systems of only action are gone and unless you can offer more, it's a race to zero. Integration and switching costs are much cheaper when you can easily map from one format to another, something LLMs excel at.
So what remains for startups? Domain complexity offered as services. The cost of offering an LLM-friendly service is less than maintaining a human-friendly UI. Real-world complexity isn't solved by LLMs: e.g. somebody still needs to understand healthcare regulations and ensure compliance. And this new headless world introduces a couple challenges (identity and permissions).
SaaS must pivot more into thinking about the "as a service" bit (think correctness and reliability), and this means re-thinking views on scaling/hypergrowth/VC. I always thought the industry overvalued, maybe now we can focus on real problems.