The Great Interface Inversion
For twenty-five years, software value lived in the interface. The dashboards humans clicked through. The workflows they navigated. The forms they filled out. The entire SaaS industry — a $2 trillion market — was built on a single assumption: that behind every unit of software consumption sits a human being who needs a screen.
Last week, I gave you two perspectives, one on the “software destruction side” or what agents might compress (of course, the world is dynamic, and many of these legacy software companies are already changing shape as we speak):
The other perspective was from the side of “the software that expands.”
Now, I want to dig much deeper, examine the foundation of what “the new software stack” might look like, as agents become its consumers and humans mostly oversee them.
Indeed, the core assumption that made the software we know is breaking — but not in the clean, binary way the market narrative suggests.
When AI agents become primary users of software, the value stack inverts. The UI layer — once the product itself, the moat, the reason enterprises paid $150 per seat per month — becomes a monitoring dashboard.
The API layer — once invisible plumbing, the integration tax nobody wanted to pay — becomes the product. And the data layer — once the basement, the thing underneath everything — becomes the only moat that matters.
But here is the nuance that the SaaSpocalypse narrative misses: the existing software foundation is not just being destroyed — it is the scaffolding on which the agentic economy is being built.
Agents do not operate in a vacuum.
They operate through existing CRMs, databases, workflow engines, and APIs. The transition is not demolition — it is metamorphosis. And metamorphosis takes time, follows a trust curve, and depends on the very infrastructure it eventually transforms.
This is a structural repricing of the software industry around a question nobody had to ask before: when the user is an agent, where does the value live? The answer — in the data, in the API, in the knowledge graph — is directionally correct. But how quickly that repricing unfolds and who benefits at each phase depends on understanding where we actually are on the agentic AI trajectory.
