A few months ago, the CMO of a SaaS-turned-AI company told me that her primary KPI was how many AI tools her team was testing. She was only half joking. Another said she felt like her job had become ensuring that if the CEO hit “Control-F” on the website and searched for “AI,” the term would appear often enough to signal relevance.

If that’s what we believe it takes to escape the “SaaSpocalypse,” marketing’s in trouble.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve spoken with marketing leaders at companies widely seen as leaders during the SaaS era, but at varying states of their AI journey. A few have been building with machine learning for a decade and only recently started using the term AI. Others had less of a running start.

What separates the leaders from the laggards isn’t who mentions AI most frequently, or who was first to secure their company’s AI domain. It’s who is willing to rethink the entire company—story, structure, pricing, roadmap, and culture—to meet the moment. And this guidance isn’t limited to SaaS leaders once synonymous with growth. It applies equally to private equity-backed, EBITA-minded software firms. The AI disruption is universal.

Following are lessons I took away from these conversations. If you are among the many marketers that are feeling intensifying pressure to secure your company’s position as a frontrunner in the AI race, read on. Individually, each of these adjustments may seem incremental, but taken as a whole, they may just give your company the momentum it needs to escape the turmoil besetting today’s SaaS businesses.

Market Outcomes, Not Capabilities

“AI slop” isn’t just generic content. It’s also shoehorning AI keywords into your site and bedazzling it with images of sparkles and wands.

Gong’s* Chief Evangelist and former CMO Udi Ledergor put it well when he advised marketers to “say what the value of your product is, how you do it, and mention AI just enough to satisfy your buyers’ need to use the latest tech—and no more than that.”

Udi should know. Gong has been building with machine learning since the company was founded. Two years ago, you could barely find the term on their website because buyers were skeptical. Today, they still adhere to their longstanding tradition of articulating the value of their products by telling stories of their customers’ success. The only difference is how. Now AI plays a role in their customers’ success.

That’s the key distinction: The customer is the protagonist; AI simply supports their journey.

It’s understandable that SaaS marketers, feeling intense pressure to establish AI credibility, would put their company at the center of the narrative. After all, they are the ones under the microscope. But in leading with self-referential boasts—many of which are too early to substantiate—you may be appealing to the wrong, or at least less essential, audience.

A friend who recently helped take a software company public shared this helpful reminder: “Remember that there’s market messaging and sales messaging, and they aren’t necessarily the same thing. Start by asking yourself, ‘Do my customers care about AI, or am I conflating what the market wants with what my customers want?’ If you are competing in fast-moving tech, then the market and buyer likely have a common desire—AI. But what if you are a travel coordinator for a traditional enterprise?”

The lesson: Cite AI enough to unlock budget, but not so much that it overshadows the human outcome or feels bolted on.

Your Roadmap is Your Perspective—Market It

In the SaaS era, companies tended to market what was available for purchase. Longer development cycles made it difficult to predict release dates confidently, so overpromising was risky.

Development is no longer the primary constraint, and we’re only beginning to experience the implications of this change.

As Mark Abramowitz, CMO of Dataiku*, pointed out, one immediate ramification is that “Customers want to buy into your long-term vision. The pace of change is so fast that buyers want to know where you’re taking them, not just where you are today.”

If marketers at AI-native companies seem bolder, it’s because they are. They market their perspective on the future, not just the GA product, because the breakneck pace of feature velocity demands a new launch strategy.

Rethink Pricing and Packaging, Entirely

In the SaaS era, pricing was primarily about persistent monetization. It was a push-and-pull exercise designed to maximize the value of landing a new customer while clearing a path for subsequent expansion. The result was often complex packaging involving platform fees with a variety of add-ons.

AI pricing is different. It’s generally more straightforward. Some AI-native companies are charging a percentage of labor displacement; others are basing pricing on consumption or value realized. Simpler still, “credits” pricing, similar to the AWS model, is also gaining momentum.

Attaching elaborate, good-better-best packages to your hot new agentic product will likely undermine your AI-first corporate messaging. It’s just not how AI companies go to market.

Given SaaS pricing complexity, it’s easy to see why packaging was a bit of a hot-potato responsibility throughout the past decade. But in the AI age, product marketing should be unafraid to lead it. AI pricing is more than monetization. It’s also a signal that your business has transformed.

Let Humans Tell Your AI Story

Here’s the paradox: the strongest AI brands are leaning harder into people.

Multi-company CMO Anthony Kennada has always been known for his creative output. When he ran marketing at Gainsight*, he and CEO Nick Mehta popularized slickly produced, irreverent videos inspired by the zeitgeist. So when Anthony notices a trend involving video, my ears perk up.

Anthony pointed out that many AI-native companies lean on their founders or heads of product to tell the story behind product launches (“market the roadmap”). Maybe these companies are trying to neutralize any stigma associated with “artificial” intelligence? Perhaps it’s because studio-quality video can be produced quickly and inexpensively with AI? Either way, since Anthony mentioned it, I see it everywhere. It was hiding in plain sight.

Pendo’s* VP of communications and community, Laura Baverman, is taking a strength-in-numbers approach to narrative by decentralizing the storytellers.

The company identified several AI builders, including the founder, across several departments, and it invests resources in helping these “internal influencers” get their stories out to the world. One such influencer built his own AI Chief of Staff product, which the company is now giving away—yet another telltale sign of an AI-first mindset.

Strip the Story Down to the Studs

In their race to AI viability, some SaaS companies are skipping a critical step: internal alignment. Transformation is inherently difficult; but it’s nearly impossible if it’s not built on the bedrock of a workforce aligned around a vision and roadmap.

Amanda Duckworth, who advises companies navigating disruption, told me that many organizations assume their AI story will “self-form” from the product strategy. It won’t.

Companies need to be just as decisive about their AI story as they are about how they distribute it. And that distribution begins with their employees.

But in some organizations, there’s a wrinkle. Employees joined your company for a mission. AI may be taking you somewhere adjacent—or somewhere entirely new. In some cases, you may even disrupt your own customers. Getting your employees on board may require broad (product, culture, mission) realignment.

Some SaaS companies are forming tiger teams to “strip the product down to the studs” and rebuild with a new AI-first vision. Others are going so far as to split the company into two organizations, with those aligned with the new mission joining the AI unit. If R&D can strip the product to the studs, then surely marketing should do the same with the story and systems built to distribute it.

Not all resets require such dramatic measures. When Intercom’s product leader, Paul Adams, took on the role of CMO amid the company’s AI transformation, he wanted to signal that everything was different—that what got the company to where it was wouldn’t get it to where it wanted to be. So he immediately blew up the marketing calendar. Years of accumulated standups, planning sessions, and all-hands gatherings wiped out in an instant. “We needed to move at a different pace,” he said. The change not only freed up time, but it also signaled that things would be different now.

Be a Credible Narrator

If you are not living the AI transformation yourself, your story becomes a paper tiger. The cultural transformation needs to extend beyond words and into code. In the modern organization, everyone is a builder. Everyone.

Using LLMs is not enough. Training LLMs is not enough. Treating a LLM as your Chief of Staff is not enough. Marketing needs to build.

Maybe your team is ahead of the curve. Perhaps they’re running hyper-targeted plays using AI-forward GTM tools. Excellent. Now ask yourself, “What might be possible if we built our own tooling?” That’s a builder mindset. Being a builder yourself will allow you to tell your company’s story with lasting credibility.

What’s Next?

As critical as marketing is, the function is just one part of a larger whole. For a company to truly cross the divide separating SaaS from AI, all functions need to transform. As Udi cautioned, “If your product doesn’t do what you say, you don’t have a messaging problem. You have a product problem.”

It’s in that spirit that, over the coming months, members of the Battery team will post about how various functions within a SaaS business need to evolve if the company is to judo the existential threat of AI into their competitive advantage.