I've been diving into that 20VC interview with Eran Zinman, the co-founder and co-CEO of monday.com, and I've got some thoughts.

Right now, the industry is split. One camp is screaming that SaaS is dead, while the old guard is fighting tooth and nail to prove they're still relevant. Honestly, most of the noise is missing the point. monday.com's current situation is a perfect case study: $1.3B in revenue, yet the market slashed their valuation to $3.9B. The stock dropped so hard that Eran himself felt the company's value was being treated as if it were zero.

As someone running an AI Agent customization firm—standing on the front lines deconstructing business logic every day—I watched that interview twice. The "doomsday scenarios" Eran mentioned? They've effectively stripped away the last shred of dignity from the SaaS "old guard."

Let me break it down.

1. The Death of Functional Barriers

Eran admitted something huge: In the past, SaaS sold "boards", "workflows", and "pretty UIs". To get users to navigate these complex commands, SaaS companies had to hire massive armies of Implementation and CSM (Customer Success) teams.

In the age of AI, that's all redundant.

Eran said monday.com is undergoing the biggest pivot in its history—moving boards and dashboards to the background and pushing Agents to the foreground. What does that mean? It means the end of the user interface.

We used to train users on how to use software; now, we feed SOPs to Agents. Users just spit out a sentence in natural language, and the Agent handles the tables and task delegation in the background. The interaction logic SaaS spent decades building doesn't even make a sound when it hits the wall of natural language.

2. Private Data & Integration: The SaaS Achilles' Heel

Eran touched on a core pain point: Agents need Context.

Today's SaaS landscape is fragmented—HR is in one silo, CRM is in another. But under the "First Principles" of business management, people and operations are tightly coupled.

AI is the CEO's "second brain," and that brain needs full, integrated, real-time data. This is where the SaaS cloud architecture gets awkward. The most sensitive business logic and core data will always gravitate toward places the enterprise can fully control. AI takes over horizontally by managing private data. SaaS companies trying to fix this by "sprinkling some AI dust" on their cloud apps is like fighting a forest fire with a water pistol.

3. The Changing Parties: Agents are Beating the SaaS Users

Eran was subtle about this, but I'll be blunt.

monday.com replaced its 100-person SDR team with Agents. The result? Response times dropped from 24 hours to 3 minutes, and conversion rates actually went up.

What does this tell us? SaaS was built for humans; the Agent era is built for machines.

Agents don't need breaks, they don't need health insurance, and they don't perform poorly because they're having a bad day. Eran predicts the software TAM will grow 100x. Where does that logic come from? It's because software is no longer a "tool to assist humans"—it is the replacement for human labor.

Before, bosses bought SaaS to help employees work better; now, they come to us for custom Agents to just get the work done. This cross-generational strike on efficiency completely guts the traditional SaaS "per-seat" revenue model.

4. The Davis Double Kill of Business Models

The public market's coldness toward SaaS is justified. Eran mentioned in the interview that when the stock hit $70, he felt a sense of relief.

Why? Because the market saw through the charade: the "Headcount + Compound Growth" model of SaaS is broken.

AI efficiency means companies don't need as many people. If you don't have the people, how do you sustain a "per-seat" subscription model? Even if Eran suggests moving to "consumption-based" pricing, that's essentially shifting from being a "landlord" to being a "gig worker."

You used to be the landlord—as long as people were in the building, you got paid. Now you're the laborer—you only get paid for what you actually produce. The valuation model has been destroyed from the bottom up. That's why compute companies are soaring while traditional SaaS is bleeding. Compute is being priced based on the value of human labor replacement, while SaaS is still obsessing over user retention.

The Bottom Line

Eran Zinman is a smart guy. He knows that if they don't pivot, they die, which is why he's going all-in on "Agentic Software."

But let's be real: many SaaS veterans are still trying to fit AI into a software-shaped box, treating it like a plugin.

They're wrong. AI is the Controller; the Agent is the Executor.

In our line of work—customizing Agents—we don't care how pretty your UI is. We care if your API is stable enough for our Agents to go in, pull the data, and push the tasks out.

The SaaS era is taking its final bow. The Agent explosion is coming in 2026.