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Roger Sauerhaft thought he had done everything right. The 38-year-old PR consultant had been running his solo practice in New York since 2021, paying $1,189 a month for what seemed like good health insurance through his states individual marketplace. In late 2023, he developed a medical issue that required a specialist, and started calling doctors’ officesonly to be turned away again and again. The closest in-network specialist was an hour away in Long Island. One medical administrator was honest with him: His plan’s network was too restrictive. He needed broader coveragebut that wasn’t available to him. “When you’re a solopreneur, your health is your business,” Sauerhaft says. “When you have a problem, you need to get it fixed really quickly. That requires access.” Approximately 16.5 million Americans were self-employed as of January 2026, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. MBO Partners 2025 annual survey puts the number at 72.9 million, counting not just full-time self-employed workers but also part-time and occasional independent earners. For solopreneurs and small-business owners across the U.S., individual marketplace plans are predominantly HMOs, or health maintenance organizations, which have narrow networks and require referrals to see specialists. PPOs, or preferred provider organizations with broader access, are available on marketplaces in only a handful of states or through employer-sponsored plans. Most solopreneurs across the U.S. get their insurance from Affordable Care Act marketplaces. Premiums, deductibles, and out-of-pocket costs can eat up a significant portion of their income, and many plans restrict access to care through narrow provider networks. This gap leaves many paying high prices for plans that dont meet their needs, forcing them to choose between their health and their businessor find creative work-arounds to access better coverage. Making it work For Sauerhaft, HMOs were the only plans available on his states ACA marketplace, complicating his search for a nearby specialist. He looked at options from the Freelancers Union, but couldnt find anything better and began questioning the future viability of his business. I thought about folding the business at that point, he says. Instead, he expedited his wedding by a few months so he could join his fiancées employer PPO plan. He had gone independent to chart his own path, but the system had basically taken it away from me, he says. Liang Zhao, 38, was able to set up her own independent PR practice in 2019, in part because she had access to health coverage through her husbands employer. But in September 2025, her husband was laid off. Their premiums for a family of three jumped from around $700 to $3,000 per month under COBRA (the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, a federal law that ensures individuals and their families are able to maintain access to healthcare coverage during certain life events, such as job loss). “We’re literally one layoff away from an entire family losing coverage,” Zhao says. Historically, this country has set up a system where health insurance has been distributed through employers, so the whole system benefits larger employers who are able to negotiate better rates for their employees. Solopreneurs who can’t rely on a spouse’s coverage have to get more creative. For Bob Christie, an independent consultant based in New York who travels across the country for his work, having nationwide coverage is a prioritybut the state marketplace offers plans that work only in New York, or other states in an emergency. A broker connected Christie with Iron Health Benefits Partners, a Nebraska-based company that works with independent contractors. He technically became their employeefilling out a monthly questionnaire for token paywhich gave him access to their Blue Cross Blue Shield of Nebraska group plan with nationwide PPO coverage. His premium: $1,321 a month. Barriers to growth When it’s time to expand, health insurance can be a formidable obstacle. Alvin Carlos, 34, a financial planner in Washington, D.C., built his solo practice into a five-person firm and knew he needed to offer coverage to attract and retain talent. But when he explored group plans for his five employees across five states, a broker’s quote came to $8,010 a monthmore expensive than individual coverage. His solution was to turn to a Health Reimbursement Arrangement, or HRA. Carlos reimburses employees $300 to $1,000 monthly depending on whether they’re single or have a family, covering premiums, copays, and deductibles. HRAs are a tax-advantaged benefit that gives employees flexibility to choose their own plans. Hes increased the reimbursement once in 2026 due to premium spikes. “Our health insurance system is broken,” Carlos says. “It is so expensive and it is so complicated.” Navigating the rules Sole proprietors and companies with few employees have to wade through a patchwork of state-specific rules, shifting eligibility standards, and premiums that keep going up. Theyre in a very precarious position right now, says Jesse McDonald, a health insurance broker based in Milford, Connecticut. U.S. healthcare costs keep escalating, so the insurance that’s covering it gradually escalates. Its been a problem thats been getting worse and worse. McDonald said enhanced premium tax credits during the pandemic briefly eased the burden for many independent workers, lowering monthly premiums and expanding eligibility. But those enhanced subsidies expired at the end of 2025. Jennifer Chumbley Hogue, a Dallas-based health insurance broker, says 22% of her clients qualified for subsidies in 2025. Of those clients, about half went without coverage in 2026 after losing that support. Still, she cautions solopreneurs not to assume theyre out of options, recommending they consult brokers with extensive knowledge of their local market and rules. Fixing the access gap For Sauerhaft, the barrier isnt cost but breadth of coverage. “Even if I had to pay $2,000 a month for a PPO, I would have done it,” he says. “It wasn’t about affordabilityit was about getting access.” He believes his states marketplace could better serve solopreneurs if it offered more middle-ground options between restrictive HMOs and PPOsor allowed people to pay more for greater provider choice. Sauerhaft, whose own coverage crisis nearly derailed his business, sees the pain as a catalyst for change. The more people who get caught in this broken system, the more awareness there will be, and hopefully pressure to fix it, he says. I am heartened by the fact that things are already much better today than they were 20 years ago, but progress can be slow.
Category:
E-Commerce
A new word has entered the business headline writers lexicon over the last month: the SaaSpocalypse. Between mid-January and mid-February 2026, around a trillion dollars was wiped from the value of software stocks. The S&P North American Software Index posted its worst monthly decline since the 2008 financial crisis. Individual stocks have been savaged, with even Microsoft, the ultimate tech blue chip, falling by more than 10%. The panic is real. But is it rational? The catalyst for this turmoil was a series of product launches from AI companiesmost notably Anthropics Claude Cowork tool and its subsequent upgradesdemonstrating that AI agents are now capable of handling complex knowledge work autonomously. The markets interpretation was both swift and brutal: If AI agents can do what enterprise software does, then enterprise software is finished. That narrative is clearly persuasive to those who have been busily dumping stocks. But it rests on a fundamental misunderstanding of what enterprise software is, what it does, and why replacing it isnt the straightforward proposition the market appears to believe. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity?","dek":"Faisal Hoques books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and techturning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/faisalhoque.com","theme":{"bg":"#02263c","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420512,"imageMobileId":91420514,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} More Than a Tool The simple premise behind the market turmoil is that AI agents will, in the not-too-distant future, be able to perform most or all of the tasks that are currently performed by enterprise software. But this vision of the future misunderstands enterprise software at a fundamental level. Enterprise software isnt just a set of tools. It encodes the enterprise itself. Decades of business rules, process flows, governance structures, compliance requirements, data definitions, and role-based permissions are held within these systems. When a company runs on SAP, Salesforce, Microsoft, or ServiceNow products, its not simply using a suite of software that sits on top of the organization. These systems hold the organizations operating architecture in digital formthe institutional memory of how the business actually works in practice, every day, at every level. Replacing enterprise software with a fully agentic enterprise isnt just a matter of swapping one piece of technology for another. The moat around enterprise software isnt the code. Its the accumulated domain knowledge, the business logic, and the deep integration with how organizations actually operate. Three Fallacies Driving the Panic The case for wholesale replacement rests on three assumptions. Each collapses under scrutiny. The first is the change management fallacy. Putting enterprise software in place is not like installing an app; these are often multiyear organizational transformations involving workflow redesign, data migration, retraining, and deep integration across departments. Companies typically change ERP systems every 5 to 10 years, and even routine migrations require months of rigorous preparation. The notion that organizations will undertake wholesale replacement of their entire enterprise architecturenot with new software, but with an entirely different paradigmignores the reality that change management is one of the hardest things organizations can attempt. The disruption involved in even incremental software upgrades creates significant operational risk. A complete paradigm shift involves risks to the business of an entirely different order of magnitude. The second is the economic fallacy. Even if replacement were technically feasible, there is no compelling reason to believe it would be cheaper. Token-based AI pricing is expensive at the enterprise scale, and the world in which running agents across an entire organizations operations could cost less than current SaaS subscriptions is not yet the world in which we live. Token costs will fall over timewe can be sure of thatbut building a case for wholesale replacement on the assumption that they will fall far enough and fast enough to undercut the established economics of enterprise software involves stacking assumption on top of assumption. Token costs are only one part of the equation. The true cost of running agentic systems includes orchestration, integration, data pipelines, monitoring, security, auditability, and the human time required to supervise and correct outputs. The last item is the one most easily underestimated: As agents take on more autonomous and more consequential work, assurance costs will rise, not fall. And even before you reach the question of ongoing costs, the price of the transition itselfthe data migration, workflow redesign, retraining, and inevitable disruption to operationswould be enormous. The economic argument for replacement isnt just weak; at present, it barely exists. This isnt to say that its not plausible in some future world. But until we have a convincing map that leads there, its not a serious proposition. The third, and possibly the most important, is the general-purpose agent fallacy. The assumption behind the market panic is that powerful, general-purpose AI agents will take over enterprise functions wholesale. But this doesnt reflect how AI actually delivers value today, and it may not reflect how agents ever deliver value. Research consistently shows that AI works best when its targeted at specific problems with rich contextual grounding. A study conducted by the Australian government found that broad-access AI tools produced significant improvements in basic tasks like summarizing information and preparing first drafts, but that their lack of fit to users specific contexts undermined efficiency gains in more complex work. The result was a productivity paradox: Time saved through automation was consumed by checking and correcting outputs that lacked the domain-specific nuance the work required. This finding has direct implications for the SaaSpocalypse thesis. General-purpose agents deployed to replace enterprise software will face exactly the same problem. Without deep local contextthe profound domain knowledge and specific workflow logic that enterprise software encodesthey will produce generic, unreliableoutputs that require constant human correction. To work effectively at the enterprise level, agents need to be narrow, contextually rich, and tightly integrated with specific workflows. And once you start building agents that way, youre not replacing software as a service. Youre rebuilding it through an agentic lensat enormous cost and with no guarantee that the result will be better than what you already have. What Leaders Should Do None of this means the landscape isnt shifting. AI is changing how people interact with software and how organizations think about their technology investments. But the right response isnt to tear up the enterprise architecture. Its to evolve it. Rather than reacting to the panic, leaders should take three concrete steps. 1. Audit your vendors AI road maps. The strongest enterprise software providers are already integrating agentic capabilities into their platforms. If yours arent, thats a genuine concern, and it may be time to look for vendors who are. The question isnt whether to adopt AI, but whether your existing partners are doing it for you. 2. Invest in data quality and process documentation. The effectiveness of any AIwhether embedded in your software or deployed as agentsdepends on the quality of the data and the clarity of the processes it works with. This is the foundational investment, and it pays off regardless of where the technology lands. 3. Evaluate agentic approaches for genuinely new workflows. Where youre building new capabilities or addressing needs that your current software stack does not serve, purpose-built agentic solutions may be more effective and more flexible than new SaaS implementations. This is where the technologys real greatness lies. Further reading Do you really know what agent means? – Fast Company How AI is changing what it means to be the CEO – Fast Company The Trillion-Dollar Question The SaaSpocalypse makes for dramatic headlines. But the idea on which those headlines are basedthat AI agents will soon be eating the lunch of enterprise software providersis founded on a misunderstanding about what enterprise software does. Its not just a tool that performs tasks. Its the digital encoding of the organizations institutional architecture. That isnt something a general-purpose tool can easily replace. The real risk for business leaders isnt that they will be too slow to abandon their enterprise platforms. Its that they will be stampeded by market panic into undervaluing the systems and institutional knowledge they already have. AI will reshape enterprise softwarethat much is certain. But there is a meaningful difference between a technology that changes how software works and one that makes software unnecessary. That distinction matters. And for the moment at least, the market has lost sight of it. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/creator-faisalhoque.png","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2025\/10\/faisal-hoque.png","eyebrow":"","headline":"Ready to thrive at the intersection of business, technology, and humanity?","dek":"Faisal Hoques books, podcast, and his companies give leaders the frameworks and platforms to align purpose, people, process, and techturning disruption into meaningful, lasting progress.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"https:\/\/faisalhoque.com","theme":{"bg":"#02263c","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#ffffff","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#000000"},"imageDesktopId":91420512,"imageMobileId":91420514,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
When a new general-purpose technology emergesbe it railroads, electricity, computers, etc.companies react in predictable ways. A small minority tries to reinvent themselves around it; the majority looks first for ways to cut costs. Right now, in the middle of the most significant technological inflection since the internet, many organizations are choosing the second path. They deploy artificial intelligence to automate call centers, reduce head count in back offices, and squeeze marginal gains out of existing processes. They measure AI ROI in payroll savings and hours reclaimed. It feels rational. It feels disciplined. It feels safe. It is also the fastest way to miss the real opportunity. Innovation waves are not efficiency programs AI is not a new SaaS tool, nor is it merely a workflow enhancement. It is a rapidly evolving general-purpose technology advancing from large language models to agentic systems and toward systems that learn from interaction with environments (the so-called world models that can simulate, plan, and act). When the underlying capability is shifting every few months, optimizing for cost reduction is like trying to improve the fuel efficiency of a car while its engine is being replaced with a jet turbine. The organizations that win in moments like this do not start by asking, Where can we eliminate labor? They ask, What becomes possible that was previously impossible? Those are radically different questions. The productivity paradox should have been a warning In the early 1990s, economists puzzled over a surprising phenomenon: Computers were everywhere, yet productivity statistics stubbornly refused to reflect their impact. In a press article, Nobel laureate Robert Solow famously quipped, You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics. That observation became known as the “productivity paradox.” At the time, many assumed the paradox was a failure of technology. My own research from that time examined why the paradox appeared at all, showing that productivity measurement lags widely behind actual transformational change and that the mechanisms of value creation were not captured by conventional metrics. The explanation was obvious only in hindsight. The gains were diffuse, uneven, and entangled with organizational change. Companies had digitized old processes instead of redesigning them. Today we are watching the same pattern unfold with AI. AIs impact wont show up neatly in cost metrics Artificial intelligence does not produce clean, linear productivity gains that fit neatly into quarterly dashboards. Its effects are asymmetrical. One employee using AI effectively may outperform 10 peers. Another may misuse it, degrade quality, or even endanger our corporate cybersecurity plans. Some teams redesign workflows entirely, while others bolt AI onto legacy processes and call it transformation. The result is what researchers now call measurement myopia: the inability of traditional metrics to capture improvements that are real but not directly tied to hours worked or cost saved. Trying to measure AIs value solely through immediate cost savings is like trying to measure the value of electricity by counting candles not purchased. Efficiency is the comfort strategy, but not the opportunity one Cost-cutting is attractive because it fits existing governance structures. CFOs understand it. Boards reward it. Metrics are clear. Exploration is messier. It requires experimentation without guaranteed returns. It demands a tolerance for failure. It produces intangible benefits before visible ones. But in periods of fast innovation, efficiency is often the comfort strategy of laggards who dont yet understand what is happening. If AI is treated primarily as a head-count-reduction tool, organizations will optimize the present and sacrifice the future. They will standardize mediocrity instead of discovering leverage. Exploration, not exploitation, builds capability Advocating exploration does not mean abandoning discipline. It means redefining it. Leaders should be asking: What new products can we build with AI-native capabilities? What decisions can we delegate to systems that learn from feedback? How can we redesign workflows, not just automate them? Companies should mandate controlled experimentation across teams, not restrict AI usage to narrow cost-justification pilots. They should treat AI like an R&D posture rather than a shrink-the-budget posture. Organizations that treat AI as an exploratory layerencouraging teams to test, prototype, recombine, and rethink workflowswill build institutional fluency. They will develop internal champions. They will uncover unexpected value that no top-down cost initiative would have surfaced. The real risk isnt overspending. Its under-imagining The greatest risk in this moment is not overspending on AI. It is under-imagining it. Companies that chase short-term efficiency gains may report modest improvements and declare success. Meanwhile, more ambitious competitors will redesign their operations, products, and customer experiences around capabilities that didnt exist two years ago. Over time, the gap will not be a few percentage points of margin. It will be strategic. In periods of rapid technological change, survival does not belong to the most efficient. It belongs to the most adaptive.
Category:
E-Commerce
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