In 2026, AI becomes autonomous: it controls interfaces to orchestrate entire processes. This disruption redefines the SaaS model and places business expertise at the center of this transformation.
Generative artificial intelligence is advancing by successive leaps. In 2023, ChatGPT placed a conversational assistant in everyone’s hands: AI spoke. In 2025, the first agents reached a milestone: AI began to act with our software and automate business processes. However, these agents remained confined to pre-built tools, predefined connectors, marked scenarios. Some companies embarked on a vast deployment of use cases while others continued to be skeptical.
What has been happening since the start of 2026 is of a different nature. With Anthropic Cowork or OpenClaw, AI no longer just activates software bricks: it takes control of a computer. She sees the screen, reasons and navigates in any interface. Whether it’s a complex graphical interface or the raw precision of a command line (CLI), she masters the codes to act in depth. And when the tool she needs doesn’t exist, she creates it dynamically, coding her own scripts to overcome each obstacle. It’s no longer automation: it’s controlled autonomy.
Enterprise software faces its tipping point
After two decades of dominance of the SaaS model, the stacking of licenses and interfaces today imposes a “silent tax” on human intelligence: 40% of working time is wasted feeding the machine instead of creating value.
The question is no longer whether this model will evolve. It is much more radical: why continue to pay for 500 licenses for a CRM that no one uses correctly, when an autonomous agent can pilot the tool for us?
A new role for humans
What makes this third wave so powerful is that it is not limited to the automation of an isolated task or a low-value process. It allows you to rethink entire business processes. This is where the change in scale occurs.
Let’s take the accounting closing: today laborious and sequential, tomorrow it will be continuously managed by a constellation of specialized agents. Humans do not disappear, they change scale: they become the architect and manager of this digital workforce.
This scenario is replicated in each function: supply chain, Human Resources, compliance, customer relations. Each time, the same pattern: autonomous agents who execute, report and learn, orchestrated by professionals who master the business rules and have a vision of the expected result. This is a significant reduction in operational costs, coupled with an improvement in quality.
The trap of technology without the profession
There remains a question that many underestimate: who programs business intelligence into these agents?
With technology now accessible to everyone, the difference will no longer be made in the tool, but in the business intelligence injected into the agents. Automating without mastering the regulatory framework or field protocols does not create efficiency, but risk: AI is then fast, but blind. The real competitive advantage lies in this hybrid skill: being able to simultaneously solve an engineering problem and a practitioner challenge (compliance, logistics, maintenance). The tools are trivialized; the expertise to make them useful remains rare.
Sovereignty: when the AI executes, the question changes in nature
This revolution poses an unprecedented question of operational sovereignty. As long as the AI recommended, the technology dependency remained manageable. As soon as it executes, places orders, processes health data or manages industrial processes, it becomes the armed wing of the company. Entrusting these digital “hands” to infrastructures over which we have no control over the legal framework or the location amounts to accepting a silent loss of control. For our critical sectors, end-to-end control of the chain is not protectionism, it is essential industrial lucidity.
A new era to reinvent everything
This third wave of generative AI begins a radical transformation of economic models. Tomorrow, the power of a company will no longer be measured by the size of its workforce or the modernity of its software, but by its ability to orchestrate ecosystems of digital agents.
This race has only just begun. And it will be won by those who will have understood, from today, that it is necessary to know the terrain to transform it.
