Markets
CROSS-CATEGORY: 'Stealth Churn' Emerges as the New Disruption Signal — Agents Route Around Productivity, Marketing, and CRM Seats Before Renewals Hit
The same disintermediation pattern surfaced across three unrelated categories at once: productivity (SaaStr stopped needing Notion), marketing automation (Marketo can't honor its own unsubscribes as agents take over campaigns), and CRM (per-seat counts collapsing while consumption climbs). In each, agents replace the human-facing product without a churn event, so ARR looks stable until renewals reprice — SaaStr calls this 'stealth churn.' Builders should watch NRR-vs-seat-count divergence as the leading indicator of AI cannibalization, not logo churn.
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