We Pay Salesforce 83% More Than Last Year. But Stopped Using Notion
The article discusses how AI agents are reshaping software usage and spending, using Salesforce and Notion as contrasting examples. While the company's Salesforce costs rose 83% due to heavy AI agent usage, Notion was abandoned despite strong AI features because agents don't use it. This highlights a shift in B2B software value from human-centric interfaces to systems critical to AI workflows.
- ▪The company now pays $22,000 annually for Salesforce, up from $12,000, despite having 80% fewer human users.
- ▪AI agents use Salesforce roughly 100 times more than humans did, driving up consumption-based costs.
- ▪Notion is no longer used by the company’s AI agents, even though Notion AI is well-regarded and the company still pays for it.
- ▪The shift reflects a broader trend where AI agents determine software value based on utility to automated workflows, not human preference.
- ▪Many B2B companies may face 'stealth churn' as AI adoption reduces reliance on tools that aren't integrated into agent-driven processes.
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | SaaStr |
| Canonical URL | https://www.saastr.com/why-we-pay-salesforce-83-more-than-last-year-but-stopped-using-notion-entirely-the-ai-agent-seat-problem-is-real/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 16 May 2026 08:24:31 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-16T08:40:17.896Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-16T08:40:17.896Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | GzFm_6dpkbY5 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Why We Pay Salesforce 83% More Than Last Year. But Stopped Using Notion Entirely. The AI Agent Seat Problem Is Real. by Jason Lemkin | Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blog Posts, SaaStr.Ai Is the business model for traditional B2B software in permanent decline because AI agents don’t need seats? The answer right now, at least from our own data running SaaStr with 3 humans and 20+ AI agents, is more complicated than the simple “seats are dead” narrative making the rounds. It cuts both ways. And for us … hard. Let me give you two examples from our own stack. Same vintage, both companies that have shipped real AI features, both companies we genuinely liked. One we now pay 83% more to. The other we still pay, but stopped using months ago. Exhibit A: Salesforce.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at SaaStr.
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