When software starts spending money on its own: Pantera partner interprets how AI agents reconstruct SaaS business models and cryptocurrency payments

*Original Title: [Software Is Becoming the Customer](https://www.veradiverdict.com/p/software-is-becoming-the-customer?triedRedirect=true)*

*Original Author: Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at Pantera Capital*

*Original Translation: Deep Tide TechFlow*

**Deep Tide Overview:** Over the past forty years of enterprise computing, the core business logic of the software industry has always been built on an unchanging premise: software is a tool for efficiency written by humans and ultimately sold for human use. Whether it is early packaged software or later cloud-based SaaS, the sales process, pricing models, and procurement approvals for enterprise software have all been tailored around the decision-making behaviors and collaborative habits of human employees.

However, Paul Veradittakit, Managing Partner at the world’s leading crypto investment firm Pantera Capital, has provided a highly disruptive assertion in his latest macro insights: software is undergoing a transformation from "a production tool serving humans" to "an active consumer with autonomous decision-making power." With the maturity of large language models and autonomous intelligent agents, most future enterprise procurement decisions will be made directly by AI, and the software code itself is becoming the largest end customer.

This qualitative change will trigger a chain reaction throughout the entire tech ecosystem. When buyers are no longer human clicking on web pages, traditional sales funnels, UI interfaces, and credit card payment systems will become completely ineffective. Instead, a new infrastructure based on verifiable on-chain wallets, micropayment flow protocols, and machine credit systems will emerge. Deep Tide TechFlow has provided a complete and direct translation of this forward-looking article to showcase the new era of software from the perspective of tech investors.


We are witnessing a fundamental reversal in the business logic of enterprise software at a critical turning point.

Software is no longer just a digital tool that assists humans in improving work efficiency; in an increasing number of business scenarios, software is directly transforming into the ultimate purchasing customer.

### Key Points Overview

For decades, the marketing and product design of the entire tech industry have been built on the foundation of persuading humans to make purchases.

Enterprises pay hefty salaries to sales teams and design intricate graphical user interfaces, all to guide human procurement managers to click the approval button.

But when autonomous AI agents take over workflows, what they need is not fancy UI dashboards, but fast, low-latency, and highly reliable machine interfaces.

Agent procurement will shift from monthly subscription models to a granular billing model based on call frequency, computational load, or even achieved business results.

In this new buyer ecosystem, cryptographic native settlements and decentralized identity credentials will become the key commercial links connecting billions of software buyers.

### A New Dimension of Software Buyers: AI Agents Take Center Stage


If the core of the previous wave of cloud computing was moving software to the cloud, then the core of this wave of intelligence is empowering software with the authority to autonomously allocate capital and purchasing resources.

A modern software agent, in order to complete a market research report, needs to autonomously purchase high-value financial data, rent GPU inference power, and call third-party cleaning interfaces.

In this closed loop, no human employee will intervene in the ordering operation for a single call. All transactions are automatically matched and settled in milliseconds by code.

Traditional business practices such as lead nurturing, business dinners, and lengthy contract negotiations have completely lost their significance in front of machine buyers.

### Voices and Insights from the Conference


In recent in-depth conversations with several top entrepreneurs and investors in Silicon Valley, we found that the R&D focus of frontline teams is undergoing a dramatic shift.

More and more teams are dismantling complex front-end interfaces designed for humans and fully transitioning to a minimalist protocol layer design centered around APIs.

Software developers are beginning to realize that if your service cannot be easily searched, called, and paid for by mainstream AI agents, then in the future digital business landscape, your product will be virtually invisible.

### The Never-Closing Business Loop: Fission Case Analysis


Taking the industry-leading project Fission as an example, the new business landscape it showcases is astonishing.

In this ecosystem, AI agents developed by different teams autonomously publish demands, provide professional services, and instantly send and receive payments in a decentralized network.

There are no holiday shutdowns of traditional banks, nor the high friction of traditional cross-border foreign exchange; the entire machine business world operates efficiently and continuously around the clock.

### Core Advice and Strategic Insights for Entrepreneurial Teams

In the face of this historic transformation sweeping through, all entrepreneurial teams in the tech field must complete an upgrade and reconstruction of their cognitive dimensions as soon as possible.

First, re-examine your pricing and delivery structure to quickly support granular on-demand billing and native machine payment settlements.

Second, place a high emphasis on machine readability and verifiability, ensuring that your product can be easily included in trusted whitelists by automated evaluation systems.

Finally, maintain close tracking of underlying cryptographic infrastructure, as it is the solid foundation supporting the rise of future trillion-dollar software buyers.

### Industry Macro Trends and Cutting-Edge Tracking

In addition to agent commerce, we are also closely monitoring the latest developments in the crypto industry regarding business, regulation, and product innovation.

From traditional financial institutions accelerating the exploration of on-chain asset tokenization to major jurisdictions gradually clarifying regulatory boundaries, the wave of compliance is paving the way for institutional capital to enter the market.

The evolution of technology never shifts according to human will. When software truly becomes the largest customer, the value landscape of the entire digital economy will be completely restructured.