PLG only worked when the product could sell itself to a team without procurement getting involved. That window is closing fast and everyone pretending otherwise is about to have a bad year.
Why is the window closing though? Because the prices went up? Or companies have to demonstrate belt-tightening? Or the AI mandate has teams building their own saas?
What AI instead is enabling a shift from Software as a Service to Service as a Software. In other words: SaaS is dead, long live SaaS. Most vendors in SaaS started because software is high margin and has limited scaling costs. But as they mature, they find clients also want guidance, professional services, and clear outcomes. This is part of the rise of the Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) as a formal role. So it's not enough to sell the software, you also now to have sell how to use the software and what transformations are possible using the software. Essentially you can sell software to an individual but you sell transformations ("value alignment") to teams, divisions, orgs.
Another is that inference will become more expensive rather than cheaper over time. The capex spend on data centers has to be paid back by someone. This is the standard Silicon Valley playbook. Start cheap, gain marketshare, operate as a cartel, and then massively hike prices (i.e Uber, Airbnb...). So vendors (even if they operate with value-based pricing) still have to protect their inference costs will see more value from going upmarket early with larger contract deal sizes
TL;DR
Companies will still buy SaaS but a new variant -> services and outcomes rather than purely software. This coupled with increasing inference costs means value alignment will more likely require a negotiated conversation than a 1-click purchase