Gartner has published a striking forecast: by 2030, up to $234 billion of enterprise application software spending could be exposed to what it calls agentic arbitrage. That represents roughly one-fifth of the enterprise SaaS market. The message is not that SaaS is disappearing, but that the assumptions behind how it is bought, priced and consumed are about to shift.
The core idea is simple. When autonomous agents can execute tasks across several systems without requiring a human to click through dashboards and forms, the value of traditional user interfaces falls. Buyers start paying for outcomes rather than seats. Seat-based licensing, the engine that has driven SaaS revenue growth for over a decade, begins to look out of step with what the technology can actually deliver.
What agentic arbitrage means
Gartner describes agentic arbitrage as the economic advantage gained when AI agents complete work that previously required people to navigate multiple software applications. An agent that can draft a purchase order, check inventory, send an approval request and update the ledger without a human touching four different systems is not merely faster. It removes the rationale for paying per-user licences across those four systems.
George Brocklehurst, Managing Vice President at Gartner, put it directly: agentic systems deliver outcomes while bypassing traditional user-experience-heavy applications. That breaks the link between user growth and revenue growth that many enterprise software vendors have relied upon.
The risk is not theoretical. If agents handle routine and cross-functional work that previously justified per-seat fees, software suppliers may find that growing adoption no longer translates into growing revenue. The same number of employees might use fewer paid seats because an agent is doing the work.
Why buyers are rethinking priorities
Enterprise customers are already shifting what they value in software procurement. In Gartner's view, bolting AI features onto existing products does not automatically improve results. It can raise costs while leaving the same fragmented workflows intact.
Brocklehurst argues that buyers will de-emphasise new tools and dashboards in favour of better outcomes. Better outcomes, in this framing, require systems that retain deep institutional memory and customer context over time, not just generative responses to isolated prompts.
This changes the vendor evaluation criteria. Instead of asking how many features a product has or how intuitive its interface is, procurement teams are likely to ask whether the system can deliver measurable results with limited human intervention, whether it can retain context across long-running workflows, and whether its value holds up when agents are the primary actors.
How incumbents are responding
Established software providers face a pricing model challenge. If their revenue depends on seat licences and dashboard-centred engagement, they may need to move toward charging for completed work, measurable business outcomes, or usage tied to automated processes. That is a significant commercial and architectural transition.
Some incumbents are already bringing agentic products to market that aim to execute workflows autonomously, coordinate activity across systems and retain customer knowledge. Yet these systems often still require substantial services work to deploy and adapt. That creates an opening for consultancies, integrators and AI-native newcomers that can design and manage workflow changes around agents.
Brocklehurst notes that legacy SaaS market share will be cannibalised by incumbents building agentic layers and taken by new entrants delivering horizontal agentic platforms. Horizontal platforms, in this context, are designed to work across departments and software environments rather than within a single functional application. If such platforms become the main way work is triggered and completed, they could sit between employees and the underlying software products that companies currently buy directly.
The services opportunity
The disruption also creates a sizeable revenue opportunity for companies that help enterprises redesign operations around AI-driven workflows. As agentic systems spread, demand is likely to grow for integration, process redesign and ongoing management of systems that span multiple software products.
Brocklehurst makes the point clearly: while the shift poses an existential threat to vendors defending legacy dashboards and seat-based models, it creates a substantial revenue opportunity for vendors that enable and develop services and platforms to support agentic-enabled cross-domain workflows.
For AI-native startups and services firms, the implication is that they may be able to position themselves as the layer that links enterprise systems together, capturing not only existing spend but incremental budget unlocked where buyers see a clear return from automation.
What enterprise buyers should watch
The $234 billion figure is a headline, but the practical issue for buyers is structural. Organisations need to evaluate whether their current software contracts are priced in a way that still makes sense when agents are doing the work. They need to understand which workflows are likely to be agentised first, and whether incumbent suppliers have a roadmap that supports agentic execution rather than merely AI-enhanced interfaces.
Buyers should also consider the counterparty risk. If a software supplier depends heavily on seat-based revenue and has no clear agentic pricing strategy, the relationship may become strained as usage patterns shift. Procurement teams that anticipate this and negotiate flexible terms now will be in a stronger position than those that discover the mismatch at renewal.
What this means for suppliers
For suppliers, the Gartner forecast is a signal to accelerate product and pricing evolution. Agents are not a feature add-on for existing SaaS. They are a different category of value delivery that requires different commercial terms. Suppliers that can demonstrate agentic outcomes, retain institutional knowledge, integrate horizontally and price in a way that aligns with automated work will have a significant advantage over those that compete on interface quality alone.
The ability to retain and use customer-specific knowledge over time, rather than simply process transactions or present information through a user interface, is becoming a differentiator. Vendors that can prove this capability in production, not just in demos, will separate themselves from the growing field of agent-washed offerings.
The Agentic Expo angle
Agentic Expo exists because the market for AI agents is moving from experiment to infrastructure. Gartner's forecast confirms that the economic stakes are large enough to force enterprise buyers and suppliers to adapt quickly. Seat-based software models are not going to vanish overnight, but the vendors and buyers that treat agentic AI as a transformation in how work is done, rather than a set of chatbot features, will be the ones that capture the value.
The exhibition is designed for this exact inflection point. Buyers need to see agentic platforms that can execute cross-domain workflows, suppliers need to demonstrate production-ready outcomes, and service providers need to show how integration and governance are handled at scale. The $234 billion at risk is also $234 billion in potential value creation for the organisations that get the transition right.