The AI-native naysayers are making the same failed objections we heard to cloud-native apps two decades ago

As I sat in a discussion earlier this week on how AI-native companies are redefining long-established software categories, a strong feeling of déjà-vu swept over me. Two decades ago, I was an early proponent of cloud-native apps and I often found myself arguing against the prevailing wisdom back then that they were too unreliable, uneconomic and insecure to ever replace the dominant client-server apps of the time. Sitting in that room this week took me right back to those days as I listened to Romain Sestier, founder and CEO of AI-native integration vendor StackOne, push back on the very same claims made today about agentic AI apps. And that made me feel that we're going to see history repeat itself when AI-native apps prove themselves worthy of fully replacing today's mainstream SaaS apps.

This doesn't mean I've suddenly swung behind the SaaS-pocalypse narrative that's surfaced ...