When Sam Jacobs, Asad Zaman, and AJ Bruno sat down for this week’s Topline, they were fresh off an in-person mastermind retreat — 13 courses of culinary brilliance, deep strategic talks, and, yes, some competitive table tennis. But after the camaraderie came a provocative discussion: What happens to SaaS when switching costs disappear — or even go negative?
For decades, SaaS business models relied on the premise that once a customer signed on, they were locked in for years. ERP, HCM, and CRM migrations were so painful — in time, money, and human bandwidth — that churn stayed low and LTVs stayed high. But AI agents are starting to crack that moat.
Databricks, Snowflake, Microsoft, Salesforce, Palantir — they’re all building AI-powered migration tools that can take months of work and shrink it to days, sometimes for free. Some even subsidize the switch. Customers suddenly have leverage in contract negotiations, knowing the cost to leave has plummeted.
As Asad pointed out, this could change mid-market dynamics fastest, where agility is higher and the benefits of a 10x-better product outweigh institutional inertia. But Sam cautioned that at the enterprise level, entrenched workflows, security requirements, and change management culture will still slow the exodus. The bigger concern for SaaS? As switching gets easier, CAC rises while LTV erodes, putting the classic SaaS growth formula under pressure.
The conversation turned to Ramp’s recent raise — a leap from a $17B to $22B valuation in months, in a crowded expense management market. Their differentiator? A vision of the finance team of the future: a lean orchestration layer of humans managing fleets of AI agents to handle compliance, expense reviews, and other repetitive tasks.
Ramp’s marketing has been as impressive as its execution, positioning AI not as a gimmick but as a redefinition of workflows. Asad admired the clarity of their narrative: the future isn’t AI replacing finance teams entirely, but AI amplifying a smaller, more strategic human core.
From AI in finance to AI in code, the group tackled “vibe coding” — tools that let non-developers build apps through natural language. Sam recounted his attempts to build a retro-style game and a podcast site using platforms like Replit, only to realize hours in that better, pre-tested templates already existed.
AJ questioned the category’s very name, saying it undermines commercial seriousness. Asad drew an important distinction between consumer “fun” tools like Lovable and developer accelerators like Cursor. But across the board, the consensus was clear: we’re still figuring out the real use cases for AI-assisted coding. Many current projects feel like novelty until the tools can consistently clear the “last mile” to production.
No Topline episode is complete without a philosophical turn. This week, it was AGI. The trio challenged the casual way some industry leaders declare we’ve already reached it. Sam broke AGI into three markers:
By those standards, we’re nowhere close. Benchmarks and flashy demos aren’t the same as world-changing intelligence. And as Asad noted, if AGI is just passing contrived tests, it’s a lot less impressive than the hype makes it sound.
For go-to-market leaders, this episode was less about predicting the far future and more about recognizing how quickly the ground is shifting under today’s playbooks. If switching costs collapse, mid-market agility increases, and AI rewires internal roles, the SaaS growth formula will need rewriting. The companies that win won’t just have better tech — they’ll tell a clearer, more credible story about why switching to them is worth it.
Listen to episode 121 on Spotify or Apple and catch new episodes every Sunday and Thursday.
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