Software stickiness used to come from owning the interface. Build the best UI, nail the workflow, and users stay. That logic is breaking down as AI agents start doing the actual work.
The split is simple: some SaaS tools treat your data as something you access through their app. Others treat it as a building block that any tool, agent, or script can pick up and use. That difference will decide which products survive the next few years.
Loom: Great Product, Dead End for Agents
Loom is a solid screen recording tool. It added AI features like auto-generated summaries, titles, and highlight clips. Useful stuff. But here's the problem: there's no REST API for pulling transcripts, no CLI for uploading or managing videos programmatically. Every bit of your data lives inside Loom's interface.
For a human clicking around, that's fine. For an AI agent trying to grab a meeting transcript, feed it into a project tracker, and create action items? Dead end. The agent hits a wall because Loom decided its AI features should live inside its own box.
Linear: Infrastructure That Agents Can Actually Use
Linear took the opposite approach. Its project management tool ships with a full API and CLI. An AI agent can discover available commands through help flags, query backlogs, create and close issues, and coordinate tasks across teams. A 30-minute manual triage session becomes a few seconds of agent work.
Linear doesn't try to be the only AI in the room. It positions itself as composable infrastructure, letting external tools and agents build on top of it in ways the Linear team never planned for.
The Pattern to Watch For
This isn't really about Loom and Linear specifically. It's a pattern showing up across the entire SaaS landscape. The question every tool now faces: are you a destination or a building block?
Tools that bolt on proprietary AI features while keeping data locked behind their UI are making a bet that their AI will always be the best one for the job. That's a bad bet. Foundation models improve every few months. The agent that processes your data today will be replaced by a better one next quarter.
Tools that open up their data through APIs and CLIs are making a different bet: that being easy to integrate with matters more than controlling the AI layer. When agents can freely read and write to your platform, you become part of every workflow. When they can't, you get routed around.
For anyone evaluating SaaS tools right now, check the API docs before the feature list. A product with fewer built-in AI tricks but a solid API will serve you better than one with flashy AI features trapped behind a login screen. The tools that win in an agent-driven world won't be the ones with the best AI. They'll be the ones that let any AI show up and do work.