The real problem for SaaS isn't AI

Everyone’s talking about AI eating their competitive moats. SaaS companies are panicking as AI-powered competitors replicate years of work in months.

But I think they’re looking at the wrong problem. Most SaaS has completely lost the plot by chasing feature bloat instead of solving problems well.

Look at Atlassian. Jira used to be a solid issue tracker. Now it’s fractured into Jira Align, Jira Service Management, Jira Product Discovery and a dozen other variations.

Notion started as a clean documentation tool. Then it became a database. Then project management. Now it tries to be everything and excels at nothing specific.

ClickUp follows the same playbook. Task management became database management became documentation became whiteboarding.

When SaaS companies go down this rabbit hole, users naturally gravitate toward simpler alternatives. If someone can build 80% of your bloated feature set in six months using AI, maybe the problem isn’t AI disruption. Maybe the problem is that you built 300% more than anyone actually needed.