Inevitable AI Group
Zapier built a five-billion-dollar company on software that couldn't complete a thought.
That's not a compliment to Zapier. It's an indictment of every SaaS product that shipped a disconnected tool and called it a solution. Every "Zap" you've ever built was a product team's failure made visible. Someone, somewhere, decided their software didn't need to talk to the next thing in your workflow. You paid Zapier to fix what they wouldn't.
Think about what a Zap actually is. A trigger. An action. "When X happens in tool A, do Y in tool B." It's a workaround wearing a bow tie. The fact that millions of businesses depend on these chains to function tells you everything about the quality of the software underneath. You're not automating your business. You're papering over the cracks.
For 15 years this was table stakes. The alternatives were worse. You hired a developer, or you duct-taped your stack with Zapier and hoped nothing broke on a Friday night. The integration economy grew enormous — Zapier, then Make, then n8n, then fifty clones — because SaaS products kept shipping incomplete and everyone quietly paid to finish them. It became infrastructure. Nobody questioned it. The incumbents loved it. Charging you to connect their software to other software they should have connected themselves was, it turns out, extremely profitable.
AI agents are questioning it.
An agent doesn't need a connector. You describe the outcome: "When a deal closes, draft the welcome email, add them to the project tracker, and notify the account manager." The agent executes. No triggers to configure. No field mappings to maintain. No three-layer error handling that wakes you up at 2am because someone changed a field name. The entire orchestration layer collapses into the product itself. The middleware disappears.
This is why the automation category looks shakier than its revenue suggests. The assumption underneath every workflow tool is that your software is dumb and always will be. You need connectors because your tools can't cooperate on their own. That assumption is expiring fast. AI-native products don't ship without a brain — they reason about what should happen next. When your CRM understands intent, it doesn't need Zapier to translate. It just acts. The per-seat pricing problem we wrote about last month was one structural crack. This is another one, deeper and harder to patch.
Builders who see this are already asking a different question. Not "how do I automate this?" but "why is this a workflow at all?" That shift changes what you build. If your product understands the intent behind a user action, half the automation layer becomes redundant by design. You're not connecting dots. You're eliminating the need for dots in the first place. The best integration is the one you never had to build.
The integration market isn't going to zero tomorrow. Legacy stacks are sticky. Enterprises have thousands of Zaps that nobody wants to touch. But the next generation of software — the stuff being built right now by teams who started with AI instead of bolting it on — won't have this problem. It won't need Zapier. It won't need Make. It will just work. The companies that understand this are building the next decade. The ones still optimizing their trigger logic are maintaining the last one.
At Inevitable AI Group, we build AI-native software into proven markets — specifically the ones where the incumbent assumption has quietly expired. Workflow automation is one of them. If you want to lead a venture into a market like this, we're looking for builders. Nimrod Lehavi, founder of IAIG, sold Simplex for $300M by seeing what the market needed before the market said it. That's the only kind of timing that matters. Follow along at iaig.com.