Not long ago, the notion of opening a SaaS product and simply telling it what you needed — conversationally, intuitively — seemed far-fetched. That moment has arrived. The signs are everywhere, and it is only a matter of time before every tool users rely on operates this way.
For years, SaaS products demanded patience. Users clicked through screens, adjusted filters, exported data, toggled between tabs and manually shepherded work from one application to another.
According to Corlytics in a recent post focusing on how agentic AI Is rewriting SaaS and product management, that era is drawing to a close.
In the model that is replacing it, the user no longer walks the workflow — they guide the system towards a desired outcome.
Software is becoming smarter, more personalised and increasingly autonomous. Applications are shifting from user-operated tools to support services, with systems absorbing more of the underlying workload rather than placing it squarely on the user. This is not the end of SaaS — it is a transformation. The endless menus and static dashboards are giving way to dynamic, responsive, outcome-driven systems. Software is becoming a service layer that powers processes, rather than a screen layer that simply presents them.
Which raises an uncomfortable question for those working in product: why are product managers still buried in feature prioritisation spreadsheets, debating whether a filter should sit above or below the fold? Why are teams still refining dashboards that only yield insight if the user happens to click through the correct combination of options?
And why, for that matter, are product requirements documents still treated as sacred artefacts? Weeks are spent crafting the perfect workflow, mapping edge cases, stitching together happy paths and hypothetical scenarios — only for the document to be reviewed by a committee of stakeholders, half of whom have not read past page three, by which point the world has already moved on.
User needs have shifted. Competitors have shipped something smarter. Or worse, users have simply migrated to an application that just understands them.
None of these traditional product management tasks are without value. But they belong to a world where software waited for people — where users tolerated friction and multiple clicks, and where development followed cycles, stages, waterfalls and rituals.
As Corlytics states, software no longer waits. Neither do users. Even a loading spinner lasting a few seconds draws frustration. We are entering an era where the interface is not the product — the interaction is. If users can simply ask for what they want, the future of product management is not about writing requirements that age faster than they can be acted upon. It is about shaping systems that learn, adapt and respond in real time.
What matters now is understanding what users are trying to accomplish, how the system should interpret those intentions, what guardrails and visibility users need in order to trust automated actions, and how intelligence flows through the product safely. This represents a shift from designing workflows to designing behaviours — from optimising interfaces to optimising intent handling, and from managing features to managing autonomous execution.
In the view of Corlytics, the product manager’s role was never really about being the expert. It was about being the connector — the translator who sees across functions, users and systems, and stitches everything together. That remains true. But now the role must be more adaptive than ever, drawing on design and engineering sensibilities alike, and staying focused on the core problem regardless of which hat is being worn.
There is one force that cuts across all of it: time. AI does not wait. Change arrives faster than any roadmap cycle, sprint process or alignment meeting can accommodate. Products evolve daily. Entirely new applications can emerge and surpass months of careful development within a matter of weeks.
At that velocity, organisations must ask a question many still avoid: is it the product manager role that is slowing things down, or is it the prevailing mindset that cannot keep pace with the speed of change? Are product managers genuinely too slow — or are organisations too rigid to allow them to operate at the tempo the world now demands? Is the problem the process, or the people who cling to it because it is the way things have always been done?
The answer, increasingly, cannot be deferred.
Read the full Corlytics post here.
Copyright © 2026 RegTech Analyst
Copyright © 2018 RegTech Analyst
