There is a lot of talk about B2B SaaS being dead.
Labs like Anthropic, and OpenAI are encroaching on use-cases directly. Vibe coding makes traditional dashboard software easy to build. VC sentiment is negative, multiples compressed.
As someone selling AI software to enterprises every day, I think this take is not accurate. What is actually happening is a generational shift.
The 1st generation of B2B software.. Siebel and others. Bad UI, on-prem, painful implementations.
The 2nd generation.. Salesforce, Workday. Cloud-based, better UI but still nowhere close to consumer experiences of the same era. Static screens, dashboards, CRUD operations.
We are now seeing early signs of the 3rd generation. AI-native software that enables use-cases that simply were not possible before.
At Alhena, we are enabling brands to scale clienteling virtually. Other examples emerging.. contract AI that negotiates redlines, not just flags them. Customer success that intervenes before churn, not reports on it.
The pattern: AI doing the work, not AI informing the work.
Here is what gives me conviction this shift is real..
B2B buyers have gotten dramatically more sophisticated in 12 months. A year ago, they would say all AI solutions look the same. Now they have deployed something, seen where it breaks, and know exactly what to look for. They ask about hallucination rates. They probe on long-context handling. They want to understand agentic architectures.
They are actively hunting for software that meets their quality bar.
Right now, most AI solutions feel bolted on. They look, feel and behave like two different systems connected via API. This will change. AI will become fully native to applications. We are only seeing this at the edges today.. which makes it an exciting time to be a founder in this space.
If you are building in Gen 3, focus on experiences and use-cases that could not exist before.
If you are serving the same use-case as an incumbent but better or faster.. that is a losing game.