It’s clear that AI is on everyone’s minds with many speculating that SaaS will be sunset in favor of new AI-native companies. While I’m not the doomer some seem to be, I do think we’re entering a new era of technology that I call the “Do Era”, where technology and companies no longer should focus on consumption or use but on outcomes.
The internet's evolution follows a clear trajectory that mirrors our changing relationship with technology. We can categorize these eras as the Read Era, the Write Era, and the Do Era. Each era has fundamentally transformed how businesses create and capture value, from passive consumption to active creation, and now to automated accomplishment. As we enter the Do Era, companies must shift their focus from measuring engagement to delivering tangible outcomes.
The Read Era: The Age of Information (1990-2005)
The first internet era centered on democratizing information access. Static websites served as digital brochures, while search engines became the gatekeepers of knowledge. During this period, value creation followed a simple premise: attract attention, then monetize through advertising (remember pop-ups and blinking websites?).
The business model was straightforward but effective. Companies measured success through page views and time on site, with CPMs emerging as the primary metric for advertising revenue. Early e-commerce players like Amazon and eBay pioneered digital transactions, but the dominant revenue stream remained display advertising - the complexity of the adtech industry shows just how entrenched this method became.
This era's infrastructure—search engines, content management systems, and web browsers—shaped how businesses approached digital presence. Google's PageRank algorithm became the kingmaker, determining visibility and, by extension, commercial success. Publishers rushed to optimize their content for search engines, creating the foundation for digital marketing. But as the number of internet consumers ballooned, people wanted more functionality from the internet.
The Write Era: The Social Revolution (2005-2020)
The Write era transformed the internet from a broadcast medium into a conversation. Social media platforms, cloud-based services, and mobile computing created new possibilities for user engagement and value creation. Business models evolved to capitalize on user interactions. Facebook and Twitter monetized attention through increasingly targeted advertising, while enterprise software companies like Salesforce pioneered subscription-based pricing to justify continuously improving, cloud-delivered software. The freemium model emerged, allowing companies to capture value from a small percentage of power users while maintaining a broad user base. The rise of Software-as-a-Service introduced subscription-based models broadly, fundamentally changing how software was sold and consumed.
This model coincided with AWS (and later Azure and GCP) enabling companies to build robust systems largely based on database infrastructure. Building software became relatively cheap excluding labor costs, with software engineers becoming highly paid and sought-after resources.
As customer acquisition costs grew with digital marketing, sales teams, and PLG motions, network effects became crucial, with platforms gaining value as their user bases grew. Companies focused on metrics like Monthly Active Users (MAU), engagement rates, and conversion rates. The mobile revolution further accelerated these trends, creating new opportunities for app-based businesses and mobile-first services. But ultimately, these SaaS products and microblogs merely enhanced human productivity. And now people want technology to go to work for them.
The Do Era: The Automation Age (2020-Present)
We now stand at the beginning of the Do Era, where technology moves beyond supporting human actions to actively accomplishing tasks. Artificial intelligence and automation are not just tools but active participants in value creation. This shift fundamentally changes how businesses should think about their offerings and pricing models.
The emerging business models reflect this transformation. Companies increasingly adopt outcome-based pricing, where value is tied directly to results rather than usage or attention. AI-driven services charge based on successful completions rather than time spent. Think about charging for closed customer service tickets or sales demos booked, rather than access to platforms that allow humans to do that work more efficiently. The API economy enables businesses to embed sophisticated capabilities directly into their workflows, paying only for the actual value delivered.
Performance metrics are evolving accordingly. Instead of tracking engagement or usage, companies measure successful outcomes: tasks completed, time saved, or revenue generated. This shift makes traditional advertising less relevant while creating opportunities for new value-capture mechanisms.
Looking Forward: The Business Evolution
The transition from attention to outcomes represents a fundamental shift in how businesses create and capture value. Not only do companies have to adapt their metrics, pricing strategies, and value propositions to succeed in this new paradigm, but they also have to reevaluate their build costs since the near-term revenue opportunity may be pushed out further (similar to how SaaS delays revenue to an annual or multi-year subscription rather than an upfront license and maintenance model). The relationship between providers and users is evolving from augmenting service delivery to outcome partnership.
Technical trends support this evolution. Advanced AI integration enables more sophisticated automation, while improved interfaces make technology more accessible and efficient. I expect everything from user interface (or lack thereof) to billing to change in this next Era for the vast majority of technology companies. Most companies will have to limit their build and overhead costs in the near term to reach the revenue generation phase without risking their business viability. And luckily, AI tools today allow teams to do more with less so I expect smaller teams to build beautiful products that achieve outcome-based value sooner and in much higher volumes. Next-generation cloud services provide the infrastructure for outcome-based solutions, enabling new business models and value-creation opportunities.
The progression from Read to Write to Do mirrors the internet's maturation from an information medium to an action platform. As we move deeper into the Do Era, successful companies will be those that align their business models with outcome delivery rather than attention capture. The future belongs to organizations that can effectively harness automation and AI to deliver measurable customer results.
This transformation creates unprecedented opportunities for value creation. Companies that understand and embrace this shift—focusing on outcomes rather than engagement—will define the next generation of successful Internet businesses. Contrary to many viewpoints, we expect more competition as barriers to entry for most businesses will erode. With lower build costs, software companies can give software away for cheap to land customers and we expect a proliferation - not a contraction - in vendors used inside companies. That being said, only the companies that consistently deliver value to customers will win what we expect to be a prize orders of magnitude larger than past generations of technology companies. The question is no longer about what users can read or write, but what technology can help them do.
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