SaaS purchase cycles have grown from 32 days in 2020 to 44 days in 2023, according to data from Vendr.  Other measures are similarly grim: acquisition costs have more doubled, multi-year agreements are down, and stack consolidation means net new purchases have dropped from 30% of deals to 19%.  One bright spot if you’re a seller: prices are higher because they’re easier to raise when you’re selling a renewal.

Here’s a new buzzword for your Bingo card: “agentic AI”, which describes systems that act by themselves rather than in response to a prompt.  Salesforce was all over the concept last week, announcing its Agentforce collection.  According to the company, it replaces the “now-outdated copilots and chatbots” with agents “operating autonomously, retrieving the right data on demand, building action plans for any task, and executing these plans without requiring human intervention.”