Software is going through an agentic turn. Services are dissolving into their component behavioural affordances, which must be wired up, or "orchestrated," at runtime by an LLM agent: a generative AI model translates user intent into a chain of steps that include both logical reasoning and parameterisation of tools like CLIs and APIs, external sources of context. It is these tools which are central to agents, and they are often conspicuously open-ended. The Bash shell is one tool. The Python language is another (or a safe subset like Monty from the Pydantic team). All this is in counterpoint to software-as-a-service, SaaS, the textbook example of a business model known as servitisation, in which products like Adobe Photoshop migrated from fixed software releases that shipped on CDs to subscription models that ship as app updates, gated by access control rather than a cashier.
If SaaS is dead in the water, then is the agentic turn just a continuation and intensification of servitisation by newfangled means? One reason you might think so is that it is often framed as unbundling, like how a car purchase has been unbundled with optional extra features as part of its servitisation. In the case of the car, though, you still buy the product; it is more a matter of tiers and customisability. The unbundling we see with agents is more of a fundamental decomposition of the tool into its behaviours, or more accurately, its affordances (often called agent 'capabilities').
If we consider Photoshop, which Adobe withdrew in favour of Creative Cloud in 2013, the payment model may have changed but the product itself remained intact. Its affordances stayed bound to the application and accessible only through its interface. You could not pay only for your background removal usage independently of colour grading. So in servitisation, the tool remains an indivisible unit, and what's more this was its moat: any competitor would have to have an equally comprehensive offering to compete in the market.
Agents dissolve this boundary and make affordances independently callable. An orchestration layer can invoke background removal from whichever provider performs the capability best, without routing through Photoshop's itself or requiring a CC subscription. The affordance is detached from the product and becomes independently addressable, composable with capabilities from other providers, and priced by execution rather than by access to a suite. Reminiscent of Zygmunt Bauman's Liquid Modernity, contemporary capitalism dissolves stable structures into fluid, temporary, constantly reconfigurable forms. The boundary that made Photoshop a coherent offering has not been unbundled into smaller products but liquefied. This is a different kind of economic event from servitisation, one in which the economic unit has migrated from the level of application to affordances.