The SaaS to AI-First Transformation - 3 Examples from Notion, Canva and ServiceNow

**Ray Rike** (0:08)
Welcome to the AI to ROI podcast, the Big Story episode. I am Ray Rike. I'm the founder and CEO of Benchmarkit.

**Peter Buchanan** (0:16)
And I am Peter Buchanan. I am the managing partner at NewPlan.

**Ray Rike** (0:20)
And this is the weekly episode where we dive in to the AI to ROI newsletters Big Story of the Week. And you can find that on Substack at ai2roi.substack.com. Peter, can you introduce this week's big story that we will be discussing today?

**Peter Buchanan** (0:38)
I can. So this week, we are going to examine 3 SaaS to AI First playbooks that are used by market leading companies that have made that transition. But before we get there, we talk about that companies. Ray, what does it mean to be SaaS to AI First company? And how do they get there?

**Ray Rike** (1:01)
I am going to go to the high level first, Peter. And it's those SaaS companies that aggressively transform their products, their product architecture, their GTM strategy, pricing and culture to reflect that of an AI native company while leveraging all their pre-existing most and advantages. This isn't a simple plastic surgery or putting lipstick on a pig. This is more like an organ replacement. They are going to act, think, and execute like an AI native company.

**Peter Buchanan** (1:27)
And why is it urgent now for SaaS companies? I mean, things look great for them a year ago, but now they seem to need to go as quickly as possible.

**Ray Rike** (1:38)
Yeah, one word, the SaaSpocalypse. Now, this was kind of stimulated by Anthropix release of Claude Cowork on January 30th, and investors freaked out. In fact, from February 3rd to 6th, just in those like three days, over 300 billion of market cap evaporated from enterprise software evaluations. Over a trillion dollars evaporated over a month, and even the biggest and the best big SaaS companies were not immune to this. Salesforce down 46 percent, ServiceNow down 54 percent, Hubstown down 51 percent. So the market is saying this is an imperative, and it's a right now imperative.

**Peter Buchanan** (2:24)
All right. Well, let's step back from that for just a minute. SaaS companies aren't going to disappear overnight. So this seems more like the battle for the soul of the software industry over the next 24 to 36 months.
Who are really going to be the surviving company? So Ray, how would you frame that battle?

**Ray Rike** (2:47)
Well, I think there's three kind of categories broadly defined. There's legacy SaaS companies that don't evolved. We can just put them to the side because they're not going to exist in two to three years. Then there's the SaaS Apocalypse impacted companies. They're the ones that have a great system of record distribution data to their advantages, and they're going to become an AI first company by doing these five things. They're going to build an architect AI native product from the ground up, not just throwing genitive AI or a prompt engine on their existing SaaS product. They're going to deploy an agentic AI layer that automates workflows while leveraging context. They're going to change your pricing to be more focused on either the work conducted or the outcomes delivered. Their GTM strategy is going to be AI first, and they're going to have this AI first culture where no process, no hire, no work structure. It remains immune to being re-engineered for being AI first company, or quite frankly, like an AI native companies. You could say that AI native newcomers would be the winners, and I'm going to quote the great Lee Corso, not so fast my friends. Legacy SaaS who do those things have a real unfair advantage.

**Peter Buchanan** (4:08)
That's right. Today we're going to do a deep dive into three companies that have actually made this transition and are just knocking the ball out of the park. So you want to know who the companies are, Ray?

**Ray Rike** (4:20)
That would be helpful if I need to talk about it, Peter.

**Peter Buchanan** (4:22)
It would. So the first is Notion, the productivity suite for Teams. The second is Canva, the really superior platform where pretty much anybody can turn into a creative and create great creative products. And the third is the big enterprise software company ServiceNow. They've all taken different approaches. So let's get started with Notion. Notion was a successful SaaS company long before OpenAI entered the chat. They've always been about collaboration, but now they're all about agentic AI, so how do they do that?

**Ray Rike** (5:06)
Well, I'll quote Notion's founder, even Zao, and he calls it agentic execution. And this is where Notion AI doesn't just assist users, it actually completes the work automatically on their behalf. And it's interesting product evolution that really transform their existing SaaS product through some acquisitions. They actually acquired automate.io in 2021, and it became the foundation layer for workflow automation. Then they acquired Cron, which became the Notion calendar. And then they acquired Skiff in 2024, and that really enabled Notion Mail. So each of these acquisitions added additional capabilities and provided the foundation for more agentic AI execution.