Scrutinizing Costs in the SaaSpocalypse

Enterprise communications systems have rarely had to cost-justify their existence; communications is so fundamental to human behavior that it’s impossible to do business without it. No one ever deployed a PBX, email server, or modern collaboration platform because of an ROI study.

However, as with all technologies, the speed at which enterprises upgraded to the latest, cutting-edge communications systems has had an ROI component. Digital (i.e., non-IP) PBXs stayed in place long after VOIP won the battle, as enterprises weighed factors like depreciation and migration costs against the benefits of improvements that were often incremental rather than disruptive.

I’m thinking about these factors as I read the latest round of articles about the possibly-impending “SaaSpocalypse,” the potential for AI to hollow out the value proposition for traditional enterprise software. Much of the focus in “SaaSpocalypse” reporting and discussion has centered on the impact this trend could have on SaaS providers whose revenue streams are threatened. Most recently, Gartner estimated that AI could have a $234 billion impact on the SaaS market.

The SaaS providers’ main response has been to shift away from purely seat-based pricing to hybrid models that attempt to blend per-user pricing with structures that take resource consumption into account. The new model presents enterprise IT leaders (and CFOs) with the challenge of containing runaway spending and/or limiting use of the AI tokens on which many services are or will soon be based.

CIO Dive sums up the above-cited research thusly: “Gartner predicted that enterprise buyers will deemphasize buying more tools or dashboards, which drive their IT spending up, and instead focus on outcomes.”

This outcome-based focus has grown more common with the rise of generative and then agentic AI, as enterprises diligently search for the technology’s best use cases. But it’s not a lens through which we’ve typically looked at communications spending. In fact, it’s almost just the opposite: Rollouts of Unified Communications systems have often been accompanied by strenuous user adoption programs, aiming to teach users the benefits of the new systems – which had, nevertheless, already been bought and paid for (or subscribed to).

So what are the “outcomes” enterprises seek from AI-enabled collaboration platforms? Do AI-generated meeting summaries or action plans need to demonstrate concrete business results? Given all the complicated scenarios envisioned by the agentic vendors – AI-generated followup; meeting scheduling; workflows and plans drawn from databases and document stores residing throughout the enterprise – token costs could easily spiral into realms that would catch the CFO’s eye. Then what?

No one knows better than an IT budget-holder that, just because a vendor is charging for a feature, doesn’t mean you’re eager to buy it – or to stick with that vendor if there’s no way to avoid buying it as part of their service. We may be headed into an era in which UCaaS, CCaaS, and CPaaS costs undergo a level of scrutiny we haven’t seen before.

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