Canada’s defence build-out is creating an opportunity that reaches well beyond traditional defence companies. Software, AI, autonomy and cyber are becoming part of the country’s sovereign capability, and some of the technology Canada needs may already be under development inside its startup ecosystem. That creates a question for our community: could defence be a market for what you’re already building? It’s one of the reasons we launched DEPLOY, a new one-day summit taking place November 5, Day 2 of SAAS NORTH AI.

AI is helping users reach value faster, while making product-led growth more expensive, pricing less straightforward and differentiation harder to defend. During a recent SAAS NORTH discussion moderated by Shane McLean of LaBarge Weinstein, Wes Bush of ProductLed, Monique Moran of Growth Assembly and Alvaro Pombo of TrueContext explored what happens when AI becomes part of the PLG model. Months later, those questions are becoming harder for SaaS companies to avoid.

Growth conversations often begin with capital, though investors are only part of the picture. Non-dilutive funding such as grants increasingly plays a role in how growing companies finance hiring, product development and expansion. Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Chelsey Fawcett, CEO of Grant Solutions Canada, shared why grant readiness increasingly resembles investor readiness and why preparation has become a strategic advantage long before an application is ever written.

Growth conversations often begin with capital, though investors are only part of the picture. Non-dilutive funding such as grants increasingly plays a role in how growing companies finance hiring, product development and expansion. Speaking with SAAS NORTH, Chelsey Fawcett, CEO of Grant Solutions Canada, shared why grant readiness increasingly resembles investor readiness and why preparation has become a strategic advantage long before an application is ever written.

When Evan Solomon, Canada’s first Minister of AI and Digital Innovation, joined SAAS NORTH in late 2025, the conversation centered on a bigger question: could Canada move beyond AI research leadership and become a place where enduring AI companies are built? Months later, some early signals are beginning to emerge. New compute funding has been announced, infrastructure projects are moving into development and attention is starting to shift from ambition toward implementation. Whether that momentum turns into long-term advantage remains an open question.

The best ideas in SaaS often take shape through conversation, on stage, between sessions and in the moments where operators compare what they are seeing in real time. Across those discussions, a consistent pattern has started to emerge. Founders are rethinking what SaaS becomes when AI is embedded into the product, while operators are watching the economics shift in ways that no longer follow traditional models. Taken together, it feels less like a trend and more like a structural change already underway.

Inside many companies, AI hasn’t arrived all at once. It has been showing up in small ways, a tool here, a workflow there, gradually finding its place inside day-to-day work. What follows is rarely a clean transformation. It tends to expose how systems are structured, how decisions are made and how teams actually operate. At SAAS NORTH, Shannon Bell, Chief Digital Officer and CIO at OpenText, shared what that process looks like at scale across a 22,000-person organization.  

Growth still looks the same on the surface; revenue climbs, teams expand and momentum builds. But underneath, the rules have changed and what once passed as progress is now being tested more closely, by investors, by boards, and increasingly by the business itself. In a recent conversation, Susan Richards, CEO of Numbercrunch, shared what she’s seeing across the companies she works with and where financial discipline is becoming the difference between companies that scale with control and those that quietly lose it.

For years, SaaS growth followed a simple equation: more people meant more seats, more licences, more revenue. Now, as AI begins to absorb work that once required teams, that relationship is starting to break. You can already see it in the market. Salesforce is moving beyond seat-based pricing with Agentforce. ServiceNow is gaining momentum by owning the workflows beneath the interface and Intercom has aligned pricing directly to resolved outcomes. At SAAS NORTH, Michael Litt, co-founder of Vidyard and Garage Capital, put a name to this shift. Software is moving from access to outcomes.