Embracing Adaptability: Why SaaS Companies Need to Become Like Octopuses

As artificial intelligence rapidly transforms the business landscape, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies face an existential challenge. Just as a mass extinction event reshaped life on Earth 66 million years ago, today’s AI revolution demands radical adaptation for survival.

The octopus offers a compelling blueprint for navigating this new era. These remarkable creatures survived the asteroid that wiped out dinosaurs by possessing unparalleled biological adaptability—changing their physiology in hours rather than millennia. Similarly, SaaS companies must cultivate agility to thrive in an environment where technology evolves at breakneck speed.

Architecting for Disposability

Dave Bottoms, Senior VP at Upwork, recognized this imperative when rebuilding the company’s AI stack. Instead of optimizing for current best-in-class models, he designed a modular architecture that allows for seamless swapping of AI components—like changing batteries.

“What we think is the best model today may not be the best tomorrow,” Bottoms explains. This approach acknowledges that AI capabilities will continue to advance rapidly, potentially rendering fixed implementations obsolete quickly.

Customer-Centric Intelligence

The most common pitfall for SaaS companies with AI is starting with technology rather than customer needs. Aarthi Ramamurthy, Chief Product Officer at CommerceHub (now Rithum), takes a different approach:

“I start with empathy—understanding what our customers in the retail ecosystem experience and all its complexities.” This perspective guided CommerceHub’s focus on deceptively simple problems like supplier onboarding.

Rather than applying AI indiscriminately, Ramamurthy’s team mapped specific customer “Jobs to Be Done”—such as faster supplier connections with fewer errors—and then selected appropriate AI solutions strategically. For example, they began with algorithmic matching before incorporating machine learning for demand prediction.

Enabling Distributed Intelligence

The most valuable contribution SaaS companies can make with AI is not just technology itself but enabling customers to distribute intelligence throughout their organizations. Like the octopus, which has two-thirds of its neural tissue outside its central brain, this approach empowers frontline employees to make informed decisions closer to where they happen.

Movable Ink’s Da Vinci platform exemplifies this principle. CEO Vivek Sharma created a system that allows marketers to send hyper-personalized emails by combining vision models, generative AI, and prediction algorithms—pushing sophisticated decision-making authority from executive offices to marketing teams.

This devolution of authority enables previously impossible levels of customization—moving from one standard email template to hundreds of thousands of variations based on individual customer behavior. Similarly, CommerceHub’s AI pushes supplier matching and inventory decisions to procurement teams, enabling them to act autonomously on complex data patterns.

In essence, winning SaaS products help customers become distributed, adaptive, and intelligent organizations at every edge—just like the octopus that defied extinction millions of years ago.