Channel|Quarterly SaaS Winners and Losers Tracker (3Q26): Key Takeaways from Our Tokenomics Survey

We’re launching a quarterly series on how advances in AI are affecting SaaS companies and their growth prospects. For this first issue, we spoke with 31 companies to understand how they use software and SaaS tools. We’d welcome your feedback and suggestions for companies or SaaS subsectors you’d like us to cover— share yours here (it takes about 30 seconds). Your input will help shape our research for the next quarterly issue!

Executive summary

1. Today, the systems of record are winning. Most interviewees using Salesforce or ServiceNow, and every one using Snowflake or Databricks, reported a rising bill for the 4 software platfoms for three reasons: enterprises buy the vendors' native AI agents because they sit on the data and inside the workflow; third-party agent access is billed per action; and agents query data far more often than people do, on platforms that bill by compute. Alongside them, the vendors of agent infrastructure are winning too: agents need gateways, agent identities, extra security and audit trails, a demand that did not exist two years ago. The losers are single-purpose tools, glue software, BI, knowledge and marketing tools, for one of two reasons: a coding agent rebuilds them in days, or employees no longer open them because they ask an assistant instead.