Microsoft VP: SaaS isn’t dying. It’s becoming the operating system for AI agents—and that changes everything

Across industries, companies are moving from AI pilots to real deployments and seeing measurable results. Teams are generating insights, completing research, and drafting work in a fraction of the time. What took months can now take days — what took days can now take minutes.

But then, momentum slows.

That’s the moment companies learn that productivity gains alone don’t automatically translate into business transformation.

McKinsey finds that 62% of organizations are experimenting with AI agents, but only 39% report an earnings impact. Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be canceled by the end of 2027.

The reason is simple: one critical part of the workflow hasn’t changed. Organizations are still relying on people to bridge the gaps between systems.

People as middleware 

For decades, enterprise workflows were designed around people moving information between applications. Every piece of software — a CRM, an ERP, a project management platform, a productivity suite — is built for one type of user: a person who manually stitches a process together because the applications themselves don’t fully........

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