The Software-as-a-Service era is ending as AI reduces the cost of code to zero, shifting value toward guaranteed results instead of tool access.
April 26, 2026
Original Paper
The Outcome Economy: A Business Model Design Framework for the Post-SaaS Era of Autonomous AI Agents
SSRN · 6395799
The Takeaway
Economic value is moving from SaaS to Outcome-as-a-Service where companies pay only for the final result an AI achieves. AI agents are making the production of software so cheap that charging for access to a tool is no longer a viable business model. Customers will stop paying for subscriptions and start paying for things like one thousand successful sales leads or ten closed accounting periods. This transformation will impact traditional software companies that cannot pivot to this performance-based model. The future economy will be defined by what the machine actually does, not what it helps you do.
From the abstract
The SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) model was built on a premise that is rapidly becoming obsolete: that access to software functionality carries intrinsic scarcity value. The rise of autonomous AI agents-capable of generating, deploying, and operating software at near-zero marginal cost-has structurally collapsed that premise. This paper introduces the OaaS (Outcome-as-a-Service) framework as a principled response to this displacement, grounded in a named economic law we call the Outcome Capture P