The market keeps saying “SaaS is dead.” That’s probably true, but it’s also not perfect. What is really dying is the idea that value lives inside a black box controlled by the seller. The next term is about resources: unlimited code capacity again limitless analytical ability. And if those two services are real, the merchant model has to change.
Unlearning 25 years as a Salesperson
I have spent my entire career in customer-facing business roles. I’ve watched the industry go through all the waves: Client / Server, Y2K, data center modernization, cloud migration, and finally SaaS as an automated delivery model.
SaaS worked because it combined complexity into something a company could buy and run with minimal effort. But AI is changing the economic unit of software creation.
When a developer is able to pair with a coding agent and successfully find “on-demand software,” the value of many SaaS environments compresses quickly. A business no longer needs a salesperson to build all workflows. They need help to work workflows with security, scale, and reliability.
Unlimited coding + unlimited calculations is not enough
These new resources do not produce results automatically. They are productive possible –and potentially dangerous. When customers try to wire everything themselves, they inherit unlimited risk: security, reliability, increased costs, biased analytics, hidden failure modes, and weak automation. Velocity loses its value when it compromises the integrity of production.
So the future trader has a job: To supply connective tissue between those resources and a set of customer-specific workflow domains (what I call the context system).
The vendor of the future builds a control plane owned by the customer
Every business has a different history, obstacles, and meaning. Every domain has unique challenges. And for some challenges, especially at scale, AI is not the best solution. So the futures trader does three things:
- Connects resources to the active control plane —the connective tissue between models, tools, data and business systems is the Content System that turns the power of AI into trusted results.
- It includes best practices – proven templates, reliability patterns, and strong component teams should not have to reinvent themselves.
- It handles domain specific challenges – focus on tasks where AI is not the best solution.
Why we built AURA
We built it AURA because we believe that this plane of control will exist in all important businesses. The only question is who owns it. The market is currently pushing teams into black boxes, i.e. closed systems that ask the customer to provide the most important asset they have: the context of the operation and the workflows built on top of it.
We think that is a bad contract.
AURA is an open source framework that allows teams to put together an agent stack that aligns with their priorities and constraints, without being trapped within a single vendor’s worldview.
Why open source is the only strategy that fits the thesis
If the content system is to be owned by the customer, then the main control plane cannot be closed. Open source does a few important things here:
- Trust and invisibility. If the agent is going to act on the prod, the parties need to see how it works and why it decided what it decided.
- There is no lock on the control plane. Teams can expand, change components, and build their workflows without negotiation permission.
- A real ecosystem. Integral settings and templates can be shared and developed across teams, not stuck behind a single vendor’s UI.
Agent frameworks will be everywhere. Opportunity works in a specific domain by building and maintaining a reliable context: workflows, reliability patterns, and supporting infrastructure that make agent decisions testable, safe, and scalable in production.
Life after SaaS
SaaS as we know it is changing. Next is better: businesses gain the ability to build workflows faster than ever, guided by their reality, without waiting on vendor roadmaps. In that world, a successful salesperson does three things:
- It gives customers a control plane they can own and expand — that’s why we offer AURA as open source.
- Provides site templates and instructions – proven workflows and reliability patterns that make AI production a reality.
- It solves a strong “data + operations” layer. – because this is where most AI falls down.
That’s why we built AURA. That’s why it needs to be open source. And that’s what being a marketer is all about now. Sign up for early access here.
