Intuit is betting its 40 years of small business data can outlast the SaaSpocalypse

Intuit has lost around a third of its market cap since the beginning of the year. It's not alone. Many established SaaS players have seen their stock prices fall in recent months, including Adobe and IBM — the latter experiencing its most significant one-day drop (roughly $40 billion) with Anthropic's announcement that Claude could now read, analyze and translate legacy COBOL into modern languages like Java and Python. The market has a name for it: the SaaSpocalypse.

The argument from investors and market watchers: AI agents can now do bookkeeping, file taxes and reconcile accounts — without a human ever touching software. For instance, instead of a human using QuickBooks to categorize transactions, Claude Cowork can access financial data, apply tax logic and autonomously prepare documents. Rather than using TurboTax, agentic AI tools can handle complex tax logic and even file taxes. In lieu of QuickBooks, automated agents can handle ...