I was on a customer panel a few months back when someone asked a question that stopped me mid-thought.
“In the age of AI, what happens to the interface?”
It’s one of those questions that sounds almost philosophical — until you realise it’s actually just describing your Tuesday. The switching. The copy-pasting. The opening of yet another tab. The logging in, navigating to the right module, finding the thing you needed twenty minutes ago, and by the time you get there, forgetting why you came.
We built an entire generation of SaaS on this pattern. And I think we’re watching it end.
The Dirty Secret of SaaS 1.0
Here’s the thing nobody in enterprise software wants to say out loud: we trained our customers to be inefficient on our behalf.
Think about what we ask people to do. We ask them to stop what they’re working on, open a browser (or worse, a desktop app), authenticate, navigate, find the relevant record, enter data, and then go back to whatever they were actually doing. Every day. Multiple times. For every platform in their stack.
A sales rep might have Salesforce, Outreach, LinkedIn, Slack, email, and a BI tool all open at once — and still be copying and pasting between them like it’s 1998. A recruiter using an ATS logs in to review candidates, then jumps to LinkedIn to check a profile, then emails a hiring manager, then logs back in to update a status. None of those systems talk to each other in a way that respects how work actually flows.
We called this “integration.” Mostly it was just organised friction.
The buyers accepted it because there was no alternative. The alternative was paper, or a spreadsheet, or someone’s memory. SaaS was clearly better than that. So they logged in. And logged in. And logged in.
That era is ending.
Flow of Work: The Concept That Changes Everything
At SmartRecruiters, we started talking about something we call “flow of work.” The idea is simple: meet people where they already are. In Slack. In email. In Microsoft Teams. In the tools they’re using to get things done — not the ones we wish they’d be using.
This isn’t just a UX philosophy. It’s a GTM and retention strategy.
When your product integrates into the flow of work rather than interrupting it, a few things happen. Adoption goes up because the activation energy is lower. Engagement goes up because people encounter the product naturally rather than intentionally. Churn goes down because the product becomes part of how work happens, not a separate step in the process.
The interface, in this model, isn’t a destination. It’s a layer. Or ideally, it’s invisible entirely.
What AI Actually Changes
The reason this is accelerating now is AI — but not in the way most people talk about it.
The conversation in most boardrooms is about AI features: summarisation, co-pilots, automated recommendations. These are real and valuable. But they’re still operating on the old model, where the interface is the centre of gravity and AI is bolted on.
The more disruptive version of this — the one that’s starting to play out in forward-leaning companies — is agentic AI. Systems that don’t wait for you to log in and ask a question, but that do the work, surface the insight, or trigger the action at the right moment in the right context. Inside the email you’re already reading. Inside the message thread you’re already in.
When I see what’s being built in agentic systems right now, the question shifts from “how do we make our interface better?” to “does our interface need to exist at all?”
That’s not a hypothetical. That’s a product roadmap question that CMOs should be in the room for.
What This Means for How We Market and Sell
If you’re a CMO at a SaaS company and you’re not paying attention to this shift, you’re going to be on the wrong side of some very uncomfortable positioning conversations in about eighteen months.
Here’s what’s already changing:
Onboarding messaging needs to evolve. The old story was “here’s how to get value from our platform.” The new story is “here’s how we fit into the work you’re already doing.” The former requires a change management conversation. The latter doesn’t. Position accordingly.
Your differentiation is no longer the dashboard. Nobody brags about their dashboard anymore. The moat is integration depth, workflow fit, and how little friction exists between intent and action. If your marketing materials are leading with UI screenshots, ask yourself whether that’s still the right choice.
Win/loss is going to surface this faster than you think. You’ll start hearing it in lost deals: “we went with the tool that plugged into Slack.” Or: “the other option met us where we work.” When that starts showing up consistently, it’s not a sales problem. It’s a positioning and roadmap problem.
The buyer conversation is changing too. Enterprise buyers used to ask “can your system do X?” Now they’re increasingly asking “where does your system live in our workflow?” The first question is about features. The second is about fit. Marketing needs to be fluent in the second conversation — and fast.
What I’d Tell a CMO Heading Into This Shift
I grew up in product marketing, which means I’ve always believed that the best marketing is just clear communication about a true thing. You find the true thing about your product that matters to your buyer, and you say it clearly.
Right now, the true thing in enterprise software is that the interface is a liability, not an asset. Every click you’re asking a user to take, every screen they have to switch to, every login they have to remember — that’s not a feature. That’s friction. And friction is a competitive vulnerability.
The CMOs who win the next cycle will be the ones who figure out how to tell the “we live in your flow” story before their competitors do. Who help product and engineering prioritise integration and embeddability alongside features. Who talk to buyers in the language of workflow fit rather than functionality lists.
My mum used to say the best guests are the ones you barely notice — they just make everything easier without making it about themselves. That’s the new product promise in enterprise SaaS. Be the guest who helps, not the one who needs a special seat at the table.
The interface isn’t dead. But its days as the centre of the SaaS universe are numbered. And the companies building toward its irrelevance are going to be very interesting to compete against — or work for.
Steve Hardy is a 5x CMO with two exits, including a sale to SAP. He works with SaaS founders, CEOs, and boards to accelerate growth at companies ranging from seed stage to $2B+ ARR. You can reach him at Noroton Growth.
