Today, the average company manages over 275 SaaS subscriptions, with a single department juggling as many as 87 of its own. These numbers, highlighted in the Zylo 2025 SaaS Management Index, reveal a challenging ecosystem where businesses are searching for tools to manage the workflows, processes, and collaborations that drive growth.

As users continue to seek productivity from mass-produced solutions, the paradigm of purchasing more SaaS apps creates new friction points:

Context Switching: Shifting between countless apps demands a constant mental reset—a well-known cognitive tax that stalls progress and drains energy.

Fragmentation and Silos: When applications operate in silos, they create barriers to collaboration, reduce visibility, and make it harder for organizations to act as one cohesive unit.

"Off-the-Shelf" Limitations: Purchased apps are built for a broad market and can struggle to optimize for the unique needs of individual businesses. The most telling sign of this problem is churn, with over half of purchased SaaS licenses going unused.

Beyond the user-level problems, the operational weight of a thick SaaS ecosystem creates significant administrative challenges. IT teams struggle to connect data and maintain support, with nearly half of SMB leaders saying they are overspending on software that isn't truly solving their teams' problems.

New technologies are presenting fresh opportunities for how businesses leverage software to accelerate their growth. AI-driven app-building platforms are democratizing the ability to build software. By using natural language, users can describe what they need and AI solutions can create full working applications in minutes. And businesses can readily evolve their solutions through chatting as their needs change. They can also easily create new apps as new opportunities emerge.

This moves the power of custom technology to the front lines of business, into the hands of those who understand the problems best. For those myriad of simple but productivity-draining inefficiencies, new solutions can be created. Disconnected workflows and manual processes can be solved with new applications spun up in minutes and shared for internal use. By moving development out of the backlog and to the front line, new opportunities to accelerate productivity are just beginning.

Sources

Zylo 2025 SaaS Management Index

https://zylo.com/reports/2025-saas-management-index

Cledara - The 2025 Software Spend Report

https://www.cledara.com/blog/2025-software-spend-report