Benedict Evans says cheap AI won't kill enterprise SaaS

Cheap AI tooling won't collapse enterprise software, Benedict Evans argues in a September 3 essay. The stakes are for anyone betting that AI coding tools let founders route around SaaS contracts. Evans says any tool that touches 50 people, or 500 spread across five departments, still goes through purchasing, no matter who wrote the code.

His argument is that the value SAP, Workday, Carta and Rippling sold was never the code. It was moving a workflow out of improvised spreadsheets and email into one system the whole company could rely on. He calls that organizational change. Coding was never the hard step.

A smaller point cuts just as hard. Most people don't see their job as an engineering problem to solve in the first place.

I think he's right at that size, and wrong below it. In a company of 5 to 50 people, the spreadsheet was never a workaround for the real system. It was the system already. There's no procurement chain to route around because there's no procurement department. A small team can build the internal tool a SaaS contract used to cover, and no committee has to sign off.