Your churn metrics don’t look alarming. Your competitors aren’t releasing anything revolutionary. But expansion is stalling. Pricing sensitivity is rising. More deals are ending in “no decision.” And your product is showing up in fewer workflows than it used to.
Increasingly, the problem isn’t your direct competitors.
It’s that you’re playing the last era’s game: building apps for users, selling seats to humans, and defining competition as other companies.
Meanwhile, value is shifting to the logic layer above your product.
That layer is populated by AI agents, internal scripts, wrappers, orchestrators, and automation-first operators who aren’t interested in logging into your interface. They just want to get the outcome they need, when they need it.
If you’re not legible or accessible to them, you risk invisibility.
Klarna didn’t replace Salesforce. They outgrew it.
Klarna famously made waves for ditching their enterprise subscriptions to Salesforce and Workday. But they didn’t build a new CRM from scratch.
They built an internal orchestration layer powered by Neo4j and AI agents that sits on top of their tools. They didn’t replace all their SaaS apps with AI. According to Charlie Mitchell at CX Today, they’re using Deel as their HR platform, replacing Salesforce with other SaaS alternatives, converging capabilities, and layering over AI.
The new layer pulls from 1,200 systems, generates natural-language customer summaries, writes outreach, and connects context across channels.
There was no one SaaS vendor that could do all of this. So they built it.
Salesforce wasn’t replaced by a better CRM. It was bypassed by a system that didn’t need one.
This is the quiet threat for SaaS today: not head-to-head competition, but displacement by orchestration logic.
This isn’t an outlier. It’s a pattern.
Across the stack, sophisticated teams are quietly building their own orchestration layers—gluing together best-in-class components, stripping out what slows them down, and automating what used to require users.
It’s not that you lost the deal.
It’s that you were never considered.
You’re still in the stack but not calling the shots.
Enterprise clients are now deploying agent-based systems to manage support. E.g., these agents pull data from Zendesk, but they don’t use the interface. They surface context, suggest responses, and trigger actions, all without a human operator.
In this example Zendesk isn’t being “replaced.”
It’s being routed around.
And the value accrues to the agent layer, not to the underlying tools.
“…in Zendesk I have to open the "Intelligence" slide out to see the summary and if I want ZD to draft AI generated response, I can't find a way. And using Zendesk's AI Agents for Messaging, creating a custom answer flow is the most annoying interface in the world.” - oceanthrsty, Reddit, Feb 2025
You’re not getting outperformed. You’re getting out-contexted.
PostHog isn’t gaining on Google Analytics because it has more features (it doesn’t). It’s winning because developers trust it to play nicely with their infrastructure. It can be self-hosted. It offers raw data access. It doesn’t require legal review.
In an orchestration-first world, control matters more than polish. Especially when the buyer is a workflow architect, not a CMO.
“PostHog is a powerful and flexible open source product analytics platform that is particularly suitable for cost-sensitive startups and SMEs. Its open source nature, generous free tier, and powerful features make it competitive in the market. However, it still has room for improvement in documentation support and the completeness of the self-hosted version.” - Candy Yao, Product Hunt, Mar 2025
You raise your prices only to discover how replaceable you are.
In 2023, GitLab increased its Premium tier pricing from $19 to $29 per user. The reaction among mid-market teams wasn’t frustration. It was indifference. They switched.
Not to a direct rival, but to combinations of open-source runners, internal tools, and DevOps glue. The hike didn’t just trigger churn, it exposed how little embedded value GitLab had in the broader orchestration layer.
“Yes, they are adding features nobody asked for like crazy, just to be able to check more boxes in some feature matrix. Meanwhile, absolute basic stuff is simply not working or buggy as hell.” — deng, GitLab Premium user with ~400 seats, Hacker News, Mar 2023
The New Strategic Question: Where Are You in the Stack—Really?
For most B2B SaaS execs, the org chart says they sell to functional leaders—heads of RevOps, Support, Product, Finance. But the architecture chart tells a different story.
Workflows are being rewritten by:
- Internal platform teams
- Ops engineers
- AI agent designers
- Process automation architects
These builders don’t care about your persona matrix. They care about legibility, composability, latency, and permissioning.
You can have the best brand in the world and still get cut from the loop because your API docs are a mess, your pricing penalizes automation, or your platform requires logins to get anything done.
You're not being outcompeted.
You're being excluded.
What SaaS Leaders Are Doing About It
B2B SaaS execs we work with are advised to take three immediate steps.
1. Run a Workflow Substitution Audit
Identify the workflows where you used to be the UI—and are now just a data pipe, or worse, omitted entirely.
- What processes are your customers automating without you?
- Where are agents or wrappers handling your core functionality?
- What’s actually being orchestrated—and are you part of it?
These are existential questions. The answers rarely show up in churn reports.
2. Redesign Pricing and Permissions for Automation-First Use
If your pricing model assumes human seats and daily logins, it’s optimized for a buyer who’s no longer in control.
- Can internal tools consume you without violating your ToS?
- Are you attractive to platform teams building shared workflows?
- Can your customers call you 10,000 times a day without an enterprise negotiation?
You won’t win if using your product creates procurement headaches.
3. Rebuild your Competitive Intelligence around Workflow and Orchestration
Most B2B SaaS players’ competitive intelligence is still product-led. It’s missing the real question:
What are the systems our customers are really assembling?
And where do we fit—or not fit—into them?
If you’re not actively mapping substitutions, wrappers, and orchestration behaviors, you're missing the field where the next war is being fought.
SaaS Isn’t Being Eaten by AI. It’s Being Disaggregated by Orchestration.
The logic tier—the layer of scripts, agents, workflows, and APIs—is now where strategic control lives.
You can still have a best-in-class product and lose the account.
Not because someone beat you.
Because they built around you.
If you’re seeing strange churn patterns, slower expansion, or more technical buyers stalling deals—don’t just look at competitors, look at the architecture.
And if you want help seeing how this is playing out across your customer base, your product, and your positioning, we should talk.
