Inevitable AI Group
There's a version of this story where AI slowly makes existing software better. Zendesk adds a chatbot. Typeform adds smart fields. Miro adds an AI sticky note suggester. Everyone iterates. The market evolves gradually. The incumbents survive.
That's not the story we're living in.
What's actually happening is faster and more brutal: AI isn't improving the old products. It's making the reason those products were built in the first place irrelevant. The architecture. The pricing model. The workflow assumptions. All of it.
The Real Problem With Legacy SaaS
Most SaaS companies were built to solve a specific coordination problem. Someone needed a way to track support tickets, so they built a ticketing system. Someone needed forms, so they built a drag-and-drop form builder. Someone needed a shared whiteboard, so they built digital sticky notes.
These weren't wrong ideas. They were right ideas for the constraints that existed in 2010.
The constraint was: computers can't understand intent. Humans have to translate their needs into rigid structures — fields, workflows, rules, templates. So every product became a system for configuring those structures. And every product added pricing tiers to unlock more configuration options.
AI eliminates that constraint entirely.
"When the underlying constraint disappears, the products built around it don't automatically evolve — they get rebuilt from scratch by someone who started fresh."
Why Incumbents Can't Fix This
The obvious move is to just add AI to existing products. Every incumbent is doing this. They're calling it AI-native. They're raising prices for it. They're announcing partnerships with OpenAI.
It doesn't matter.
The problem isn't that they don't have AI. The problem is that their entire product architecture is built around the old constraint. The database schema. The API structure. The billing model. The feature set. All of it was designed assuming that humans need to manually configure everything.
You can't solve that by adding a chatbot to the sidebar. You have to rebuild from scratch.
Rebuilding from scratch is something incumbents almost never do. They have existing customers. They have backward compatibility requirements. They have engineering teams optimized for incrementalism. They have board members who want predictable revenue, not a risky rewrite.
This is the window. And it won't stay open forever.
The Numbers Already Show It
Zendesk charges $55 per agent per month. Corebee launches at a fraction of that, built AI-first. Typeform charges $25/month for a form builder. Spiceform starts free and uses AI to build forms from plain language. Miro is worth $17 billion. Overboard is free and rebuilt the whiteboard with AI at the core.
These aren't incremental improvements. They're AI-native rebuilds — designed from scratch around what AI actually makes possible, priced for the market they deserve.
This pattern is going to repeat across every SaaS category. Customer support. Forms. Whiteboards. Scheduling. Project management. CRM. HR software. Every category that was built to help humans configure things is now open for an AI-native version that doesn't require configuration at all.
The Timing Question
The common objection: isn't it too early? Won't the incumbents catch up?
They won't. Not because they're bad companies — many of them are exceptional. But because the speed at which AI capabilities are improving is outpacing any large organization's ability to restructure around them.
While a $2B company is running a committee to decide whether to rebuild their core product, a single focused founder can ship a replacement in 30 days. That gap is structural. It's not going to close.
The window isn't about being early to AI. Everyone has access to the same models. The window is about being early to the specific markets that are ripe — the ones where the technical debt is highest, the pricing is most egregious, and the switching cost is lowest.
That's exactly what we're looking for at IAIG. And the list is longer than most people think.
The rebuild is already in progress. The only question is whether you're building what comes next — or waiting to see what happens.