Peter Griffin: The software industry is heading for its biggest upheaval since the cloud
Peter Griffin: The clutter of apps on your phone will go away; you won’t need a fancy phone any more. Photo / Getty Images
In January, I finally got around to replacing my personal website, which serves as an archive for more than 4000 articles written during the past 25 years. I’d been dreading doing so for years. But it was a breeze. I opened the AI agent in Replit, a software development application, and told it to look at my old website, transfer everything across, keep the existing navigation and “zhuzh it up a bit”.
Within three minutes, Replit had built a slick new website for me. Sure, it needed a few alterations, which the chatbot quickly took care of. But a few hours later, I disabled my 15-year-old WordPress website for good. That was the “aha!” moment for me about the future of software. If I can do that with an AI agent-powered coding tool and a handful of prompts, it’s game over for the existing software model.
The so-called “SaaSpocalypse” (software as a service), which in February saw billions wiped off the market value of publicly listed software-as-a-service companies, is underway. For the past two decades, software has been defined by interfaces. We’ve been trained to tap, swipe, click and scroll our way through an ever-expanding jungle of apps and dashboards. Each company built its own little kingdom, its own login, its own user experience.
That model is breaking. The rise of AI agents, persistent, task-oriented digital assistants, will fundamentally change how we interact with software. Instead of opening Xero, the Kiwi-built accounting software, business owners will soon just tell Claude or ChatGPT: “reconcile my accounts” or “chase late invoices”.
The agent will handle the rest, jumping between services, stitching together workflows, not interfaces. Apps, as we know them, will disappear.
That’s part of the reason Xero’s share price has roughly halved in the past year. It still makes great accounting software, but its mission to build “beautiful accounting software” means a lot less in the AI era.
Big Tech players like Apple and Microsoft, which have invested heavily in applications and interfaces, will take direct hits. Apple has spent years perfecting the iPhone as a gateway to apps. Microsoft rebuilt itself around cloud software and productivity suites.
Both depend on users engaging with their ecosystems through screens, menus and branded experiences. But if users increasingly interact through a single AI layer, one that sits above the operating system and abstracts away the complexity, then the power shifts. The value moves from the app to the agents, which are being built by the likes of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI and its rival, Anthropic.
“It’s kind of the beginning of the end for Apple,” Naval Ravikant, the US entrepreneur and tech investor, said on his podcast last month. “Apple relies on their operating system and their apps being better than everybody else.”
Instead of firing up the Uber app on your phone, soon you’ll just tell the Claude or Gemini AI assistant to order you an Uber. The clutter of apps on your phone will go away because everything will run through one AI interface. You won’t need a fancy phone any more. Apple’s vastly profitable App Store will feel the flames of the SaaSpocalypse.