Selling of related industry stocks, driven by fears of a “SaaS apocalypse” in which AI could weaken or even eliminate the presence of existing enterprise software, appears to be easing in recent days.

Against that backdrop, shares of major software-as-a-service (SaaS) companies are also rising.

Salesforce, one of the best-known SaaS companies, surged 20 percent in a single day after its quarterly earnings report, as if to show there is no SaaS apocalypse. Its shares have jumped 65 percent from a June low.

In a recent report, the Financial Times (FT) said software-company shares have generally risen over the past two months, showing Wall Street is distancing itself from the worst-case scenario on the SaaS apocalypse.

The view that companies could use AI coding to build software themselves and discard the software they currently pay to use was “over” from the outset. Some also say certain software firms have the resilience not to be hurt even as AI spreads.

The FT said companies that hold “ground truth” data showing what is happening inside a business, or that play the role of a “system of record,” or are closely tied to corporate work processes are relatively safer from AI’s impact.

Analysts say the SaaS apocalypse still holds in the market for general-purpose software that is not closely linked to core operations. Airtable, a spreadsheet and database startup once valued at $10 billion, was recently sold at one-fifth of the price. Medallia, a general-purpose survey-tool company, inflicted a loss of $5 billion on its owner, private equity firm Thoma Bravo, the FT reported.

Headless has also emerged as a heavyweight variable in the enterprise software market.

Headless software removes the user interface (UI) that defines how users use software and allows AI agents to directly access data stored in the software. Salesforce declared a shift to headless in April, and major software companies such as Workday and SAP have also moved to convert some functions to a headless approach.

Headless could also bring major changes to the enterprise software business model. If AI agents replace some work done by people, those agents may not need the widely used software common today. For companies that have charged based on headcount, that could clearly be a business-model risk, analysts say.

The FT said: "The bigger problem is that a significant part of the value users got from software came from the UI." It said this includes input forms, dashboards, analytics tools and other functions that determine how work is performed and managed. "As AI agents start bypassing the UI and accessing data directly, much of the existing functionality will be delivered in new ways that have little to do with existing human-centric software," it said.

It added: "Such a change risks relegating software that is essential today to a simple back-end database in the future. It will still be indispensable, but it may no longer be technology that can command a high price."

Some also expect headless to create opportunities in the enterprise software market. According to Aaron Levie (아론 레비), CEO of collaboration software company Box, existing software business models price by the number of users, and software use has been limited by how much work a person can handle in a day. As a result, most software has not been used as much as its actual processing capacity.

Agents can change that structure. Levie said: "AI agents handle multiple tasks at the same time 24 hours a day, connecting work across multiple systems. They process entire batches of contracts at once instead of reviewing them one by one, run 10 times more marketing campaigns, and speed up customer onboarding where bottlenecks used to arise at steps involving people." He also said: "Systems of record like Salesforce can be used more than 100 times through agents. They can be used more for customer targeting and sales automation, and can also be used to turn documents into structured data to automate other workflows."