Rakib Azad, CFO Fellow at CovQ
Over the past year, as “SaaSpocalypse” entered the business vocabulary, I’ve kept coming back to one question. How do the SaaS unicorns minted in the early 2020s get their growth engines going again when the way customers buy and use software is changing underneath them?
The valuation reset was already well underway before many of these companies had worked out their AI strategies. SaaS Capital’s index of public B2B SaaS companies entered 2026 at a median valuation of about 5.6× annualized run-rate revenue, roughly one-third of its 2021 peak. For leadership teams that raised capital during the boom, the last financing price can still loom large in boardroom conversations. The question I’d put to the board today is what the company can do over the next three years to produce growth and cash flows that investors will underwrite.
The product and the economics are changing together
For much of the SaaS era, customers adapted parts of their workflows to the software they bought. AI raises the expectation that software can adapt to the way a customer already works. A customer might still rely on the same system to store records or enforce approvals, while expecting an agent to do work that previously required several people clicking through screens. That changes where the customer sees value and can change who captures it.
Many enterprise SaaS products also offer platform-as-a-service (PaaS) capabilities, giving customers and partners a foundation for building integrations and extending workflows. Those integrations, including data and AI, the workflows built around them, and the proprietary IP behind the platform can create a moat that’s hard for competitors to replicate.
It also changes the economics for the vendor. As AI usage grows, the cost to serve a customer can rise with model inference, retries, and human review. Depending on the product, a vendor might charge by seat, by usage or outcome, or through a platform fee with an included usage allowance. Each choice puts a different share of the cost and volume risk on the vendor. A flat fee is easy for customers to budget, for example, but heavy users can have very different margins from the rest of the customer base.
Some vendors are also putting forward-deployed engineers alongside customers to integrate the product into their workflows and build what’s missing. That can be a smart investment, especially when the work produces capabilities that the next customer can use. The economics look different if every deployment requires a fresh round of bespoke engineering. I’d want to know how much of that work becomes part of the core product and whether implementation effort falls with each subsequent rollout.
Replatforming forces a series of capital allocation decisions
For a company with an established SaaS business, the hard part is funding the transition while continuing to serve and renew the customers who pay for it. Product may need to replace a feature that still generates meaningful revenue. Sales may need to sell a new pricing model while carrying a quota built around the old one. Customer success has to manage the migration, and finance has to plan for a period when the company is supporting both products and the new economics are still being tested.
Consider a customer support software company that charges by the seat. It launches an AI agent that can resolve some tickets on its own. Pilot usage is strong, and several customers now expect to renew with fewer seats. Should the vendor bundle the agent to defend renewals, charge per resolved ticket, or offer a platform fee with a usage allowance?
I’d start with the economics of the whole account. How much seat revenue is at risk at renewal? How much will the customer pay for the agent? After inference, escalations, and support, what happens to account gross profit? I’d also track reopened tickets so we can tell whether the agent is resolving issues or simply closing them. And the baseline matters. If a competitor could take the account at renewal, giving up some seat revenue to keep the customer may be a good trade. Compare the new offer with what is likely to happen if the company keeps selling the old one.
With constrained capital, I’d fund the next round of investment against specific evidence. A pilot may earn more engineering capacity if customers use the agent repeatedly, pay for it at renewal, and generate enough gross profit to justify broader deployment. If adoption is strong but margins are weak, leadership can decide whether to change the pricing, narrow the use case, or reduce the cost of delivery before expanding. Making room for that work may mean pausing a lower-priority roadmap item or slowing hiring elsewhere. That trade-off belongs in the plan from the start.
Give the leadership team one place to run the plan
One thing I’ve seen personally, and hear repeatedly from other CFOs, is how difficult it is to connect the strategy everyone agreed to with the decisions teams make every week. The strategic priorities are in the board deck. The budget is in the financial model. Product and sales have their own measures of progress. By the time the leadership team puts those pieces together, another quarter of spending may already be committed.
For the handful of bets that matter most, I’d want everyone working from the same set of assumptions. Each bet should have an accountable executive, a budget, an expected business outcome, and a date when leadership will decide whether to expand, change, or stop it. The support software company, for example, could review ticket quality and delivery cost monthly, then use renewal data at the quarterly review to decide whether to shift more engineering and sales capacity toward the agent. That makes the planning process a way to act on evidence while there’s still time to move resources.
This is what drew me to CovQ. It brings strategic priorities, execution, and progress into one place so the leadership team can see how its decisions connect to the outcomes it’s trying to produce. That connection matters most when the original plan starts to diverge from what customers are telling you.
I see the CFO’s role as helping the company make those calls early enough to matter. At the next operating review, pick the initiative consuming the most incremental capital. Ask the team which part of the business it will improve, what the evidence says so far, and what result would make you move people or dollars. If the answers differ around the table, you’ve found the first thing your strategic planning process needs to fix. This, in turn, will directly lead to value creation, which is the most important thing of all.
