What lessons from the SaaS era apply to AI adoption today?

When the Internet/SaaS took over the world, people had to create or repurpose the budgets for tooling. IT spend is still very low in most companies, perhaps <2% of revenue. The global IT market that spooled out from that is very large indeed (say $5T in 2025 according to Gartner).

Consider the four following ideas:

1. With AI automating tasks or outcomes, the budget allocated will likely be re-purposed from the labour cost, which will by closer to 30-50% of revenue.

2. AI enables entirely new business models to be created and delivered at incredible speed.

3. AI is not used in any real scale in most companies today.

4. Agentic solutions can do much of the tasks that SaaS tools can do.

I think some AI vendors are hugely overvalued, but I also think that others may be undervalued.

OpenAI is worth $500B. In a market where the potential is 20 times the current IT spend, this would represent $500B on a market size of $100T, or 5% of that market.

No-one knows how this going to end up, of course.

The key part is converting the technology to real and usable business outcomes at speed. That is the next gate that AI vendors need to unlock.