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.

Product teams today can build faster than ever. Tools like Claude Code and AI copilots have compressed development cycles and lowered the cost of execution. What hasn't changed is the harder part of product work. Teams still need to decide what deserves to exist, how to avoid unnecessary complexity and how to protect the people doing the work as expectations rise. At SAAS NORTH 2025, Kris Nicolaou, Founder and CEO of Brain Box Labs, explored that tension through a simple idea: great products emerge when strong systems support great people.

When a company crosses the billion-dollar revenue mark, it is tempting to focus on the milestone itself. What often goes unexamined is the operating discipline, the cultural decisions and the structural rigor that made that milestone possible. At SAAS NORTH, JD Saint-Martin, President of Lightspeed, offered a candid look at how Lightspeed grew from $75 million in revenue in 2019 to more than $1.2 billion in recurring revenue. As he prepares to step down in March 2026 to mentor and invest in early-stage Canadian founders, the perspective he shared feels less like a tactical update and more like a reflection on what it truly takes to build enduring scale from Canada.

Across startups, a simple question keeps coming up: how much of this work still needs a human? Recent shifts, including tools like Claude Code, have accelerated what small teams can realistically build and automate, changing expectations across roles and workflows. That reality was front and centre at SAAS NORTH during Work Rewired: Building Lean, AI-First Teams, a candid conversation moderated by Aydin Mirzaee, CEO and co-founder of Fellow.ai. He was joined by Alexis MacDonald, Mohammad Hashemi, and Felipe Izquierdo. Rather than theory, the session focused on what actually changes inside companies once AI becomes unavoidable.

After years of tighter funding, heightened global competition and rising expectations on efficiency and execution, the decision feels less hypothetical and more defining. Against this backdrop, the SAAS NORTH session Should I Stay or Should I Go Now? The Great Canadian Dilemma continues to resonate. Moderated by Lucy Hargreaves, co-founder and CEO of Build Canada, the conversation brought together Matt Himel (Harvest), Rachel Zimmer (Simple Ventures), and Claudio Rojas (National Angel Capital Organization) for a rare, grounded discussion on what staying (or leaving) really entails.

2026 is underway, and many founders are approaching the year with renewed focus. We recently sat down with Dilara Cossette, Founder of FIP. A demand generation agency helping HR tech companies connect with HR leaders through demand generation events. Dilara unpacks how demand generation is evolving in 2026 and what SaaS leaders should prioritise as they plan for the year ahead. From community-led growth to irresistible offers and sales and marketing alignment, Dilara shares practical insights founders can apply immediately.

This year has pushed founders into constant adaptation. With market resets, scarce capital, restructuring pressures and changing board expectations, many are re-examining how they define resilience, influence, and success. Against this backdrop, the SAAS NORTH session Building Beyond Success: Reinvention and the Entrepreneur’s Journey felt especially timely. Moderated by Siri Agrell, CEO of BetaKit, the conversation brought together Marie Chevrier Schwartz (TechTO & Peerscale) and Katherine Homuth (Oomira & SRTX) for one of the most candid, unvarnished discussions of the conference.