32% of companies are skipping SaaS to build with AI coding agents
SaaS vendors have a new competitor: the companies that used to be their customers. McKinsey’s State of AI in 2026 report finds that 32% of surveyed organizations have decided against buying at least one software product or feature because they could build it internally using agentic coding tools.
The numbers by sector
The shift is widespread but uneven. Technology companies lead it, with 41% reporting they skipped a software purchase in favor of in-house AI development. Healthcare payers and providers follow at 39%, with professional services and energy and materials both at 38%. Financial institutions sit at 36%, media and telecom at 34%, and pharma and medical products at 33%. Insurance and the public sector trail at 19% and 17% respectively.
What this means for the buy-vs-build question
For years the default answer for most companies was buy. Agentic coding tools are quietly flipping that calculus for a growing slice of organizations. McKinsey Senior Partner Lieven Van der Veken notes that leaders who once assumed AI development was beyond their internal teams are now asking what those teams can build themselves.
Van der Veken is careful to add that this is not a call to build everything in-house. The framing he offers is more deliberate: decide where to buy, where to build, and where to develop just enough internal capability to integrate and scale what already works.
The broader AI adoption picture
Nine in ten respondents now report regular AI use in at least one business function. Enterprise-wide scaling jumped from 38% to 44% year over year. Organizations running AI across three or more functions grew from 51% to 56%.
Larger organizations are pulling ahead. Among companies with at least $1 billion in annual revenue, 54% report scaling AI enterprise-wide. Among smaller organizations, that figure sits at one-third. The same gap shows up in agentic AI adoption: large enterprises grew from 27% to 40% scaling agents across one or more functions, while smaller organizations stayed flat at 22%.
The operator takeaway
If you are a solopreneur or small team, you already operate like the leading edge of this trend. The tools that are pushing enterprise teams toward internal builds are the same ones available to you today. The question worth asking is which line items in your SaaS stack could be replaced by a focused agent built in a weekend.
I’m founder of BizStack at Cagri Sarigoz LLC and a passionate advocate for entrepreneurs.
With over 14 years in tech, marketing, and AI, including my role as Head of SEO at CitizenShipper and co-founder of TaleBot at Intale AI, I’m dedicated to sharing genuine, useful product insights and tips.
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