A lot of SaaS companies are trying to become the platform customers build on.
You can see it everywhere.
Gainsight is opening up agentic retention workflows. Salesforce is pushing Agentforce into CRM. Intercom is moving Fin beyond support chat. ServiceNow is turning workflows into natural-language actions.
The direction is clear. Software is becoming less about screens, and more about context, actions, and workflows.
If a customer builds around you, integrates you deeply, extends you, or runs critical work through you, you become much harder to replace.
That makes sense. But I think there is a big missing middle here.
Most SaaS companies are not Salesforce or ServiceNow. They have complex products, messy workflows, non-technical users, and years of permissions, settings, roles, edge cases, and legacy behavior. And still, people need to log in every day and get work done.
So the question is bigger than whether customers can build on top of the product. It is also whether the product itself can become much easier to operate.
Does it understand where the user is? Does it know what they are trying to do? Can it spot friction before the user gives up? Can it guide someone through a workflow without sending them to another doc? Can it help complete the task instead of creating another ticket, call, or follow-up?
I think a lot of SaaS defensibility will come from this layer.
APIs matter. Marketplaces matter. Developer platforms matter. But for many products, the bigger opportunity is much closer to the surface.
Make the product people already use feel intelligent. The UI is not disappearing tomorrow, but it probably needs to stop acting like the user is on their own.