The Most Important Change In Software May Not Be AI
Preparing for my keynote at Engage.Paris forced me to revisit a question I've been thinking about for some time:What is actually changing in software?
The obvious answer is AI. Agents, automation and productivity gains have become the dominant narrative across the industry.
Yet the more I prepared for that discussion, the more I found myself distracted by a different question. Not what AI would do to software. But what software was already becoming.
Because while AI has become the dominant narrative, there is another story unfolding beneath the surface. A quieter one. One that receives less attention because it lacks the immediacy of a new model release or a breakthrough benchmark. Yet it may prove far more consequential over the next decade.
The story is economic rather than technological.
Over the last fifteen years, I've spent most of my time around software companies. Some were startups, some were scale-ups, some were private-equity backed businesses trying to find their next phase of growth. The conversations were never exactly the same, but they generally revolved around a familiar set of concerns: building better products, acquiring more customers, expanding into new markets and improving go-to-market efficiency.
Recently, those conversations have started to feel different.
Growth remains important, but growth feels harder. Product advantages still matter, but they seem less durable. Customer acquisition remains a priority, but increasingly it feels like a temporary advantage rather than a lasting one. At the same time, investors appear more interested in retention, efficiency and value realization than they were during the previous decade. Existing customers, once viewed primarily as a source of renewals and expansion, are becoming strategic assets in their own right.
Each of these developments can be explained individually. Together, however, they appear to point in the same direction.
For most of the SaaS era, software companies competed through a combination of product and distribution. Build something differentiated, put it in front of enough customers, and growth would usually follow. The model worked remarkably well because software enjoyed a set of economic characteristics that few industries could match. Once built, software could be distributed at minimal marginal cost. Strong products could remain differentiated for years. Recurring revenue created predictability. Growth generated leverage.
These dynamics produced one of the most successful business models of the modern economy.
What is interesting is not that these advantages are disappearing. It is that many of them appear to be compressing simultaneously.
AI is part of that story. Not because it replaces software, but because it reduces the cost of creating it. Features that once required significant engineering effort can now be replicated more quickly. Commercial activities that once demanded entire teams are increasingly assisted by automation. Knowledge itself is becoming more accessible.
The result is not the end of software. The result is that some of the advantages software companies relied upon for decades may become less defensible.
When that happens, companies inevitably start looking elsewhere for differentiation.
Increasingly, that differentiation seems to be moving toward outcomes.
Customers Never Wanted Software
One of the peculiar habits of the software industry is that we often confuse what we sell with why customers buy it.
Software companies naturally spend their time discussing products, features and categories. Yet customers rarely think about software in those terms. A CFO does not wake up wanting a new ERP. A sales leader does not dream about buying another CRM. A customer leader is rarely interested in a Customer Success platform for its own sake.
What they want are outcomes.
Revenue growth.
Lower costs.
Faster execution.
Higher retention.
Better decisions.
Software has always been a mechanism for producing these results. The outcome was the destination. The product was simply the vehicle.
Historically, that distinction was easy to ignore because software companies were primarily compensated for providing access to the vehicle. Whether the customer ultimately arrived at the destination often depended on a complex combination of adoption, implementation, change management, executive sponsorship and operational discipline.
Increasingly, that separation feels less stable.
The emergence of outcome-based pricing is one signal. The rise of AI agents capable of performing actual work is another. The growing importance of retention and customer expansion is a third. Taken together, they suggest a world in which software companies become progressively more accountable for the outcomes their products create.
And once accountability shifts toward outcomes, many assumptions embedded in modern software organizations begin to change.
The Return of Services
Perhaps nowhere is this more visible than in the renewed importance of services.
For years, software companies worked hard to distance themselves from service businesses. Investors rewarded recurring software revenue because it scaled more elegantly than human-intensive services. Margins were higher. Growth was faster. Operational complexity was lower.
Services were often treated as a necessary but undesirable component of the business.
Yet outcomes rarely emerge from software alone.
They emerge from software, implementation, education, process redesign, change management and ongoing operational execution. As software companies become increasingly accountable for customer outcomes, these capabilities move closer to the center of the business.
This does not necessarily mean a return to traditional consulting. More likely, it means the emergence of hybrid operating models where software, services and AI become increasingly difficult to separate.
The most interesting software companies of the next decade may look less like pure software vendors and more like outcome delivery platforms.
Why Customer Success Feels Different
This shift also helps explain why Customer Success feels simultaneously more important and more uncertain than ever.
Historically, Customer Success existed because there was a gap between purchase and value realization. Customers bought software long before they experienced the business outcomes that justified the purchase. The entire discipline emerged to reduce uncertainty during that period.
Health scores, onboarding programs, QBRs, adoption initiatives and success plans were all attempts to bridge the distance between software deployment and customer value.
But if outcomes become more observable, more measurable and increasingly tied to commercial models, the role evolves.
The future Customer Success leader may spend less time demonstrating value and more time orchestrating its creation. Less time reporting on outcomes and more time ensuring they occur. Less relationship manager, more operator.
The distinction sounds subtle. It is anything but.
The Outcome Economy
What interests me most is not any individual trend. It is the possibility that they are all manifestations of the same underlying transition.
The move toward outcome-based pricing.
The resurgence of services.
The growing importance of retention.
The convergence of Customer Success, Professional Services and AI agents.
The changing expectations of investors.
The compression of product advantages.
Viewed independently, they seem unrelated. Viewed together, they begin to resemble a different economic model for software. One where companies compete not only through products and distribution, but through their ability to produce measurable outcomes efficiently and repeatedly.
Perhaps that is the real story unfolding beneath the AI narrative. Not that software is disappearing. Not that AI is replacing companies. But that the unit of value itself is changing.
For decades, software companies sold access to tools. Increasingly, they may be asked to sell results. If that turns out to be true, then AI may not be the most important change happening in software.
It may simply be the catalyst that made the change impossible to ignore.
Benoit
