How has the ICP for B2B SaaS changed over the past 12 months — and how is this reflected in marketing messaging?

If we say that the ICP for B2B SaaS has supposedly changed radically because of AI dev tools and vibe coding — because every client can now become “their own software developer” and therefore no longer needs part of B2B SaaS — I would not agree with that.

In my view, there has been no global shift in the customer profile or positioning. And during the C-Growth meeting, we discussed many of the reasons why.

B2B SaaS is not just code.

And not only code. It is interface, infrastructure, reliability, integrations, support, business logic, security, access rights, documentation, implementation, and ongoing maintenance. Yes, today it is possible to build something that looks like a product, or assemble an internal tool, faster and with fewer resources. But there is still a huge gap between “something works in a prototype” and “this can be used in a real business process over a long period of time.”

The client does not pay only for the product or only for integration.

They pay for understanding business processes, describing them, structuring them, and translating them into the language of a software product. In many cases, this is the core part of the value. Not building a screen or a workflow, but understanding how the task actually works: where the bottlenecks are, which roles are involved, what data is needed, what risks exist, and what outcome needs to be achieved. What becomes scarce is not code, but understanding: of processes, of data ownership, and of where things fail to connect.

We still tend to overestimate how deeply clients are actually immersed in AI solutions and AI expertise.

Yes, interest is huge. But that does not mean that most companies are already ready to design, build, maintain, and develop their own SaaS solutions independently. Especially when we are not talking about a simple internal tool, but about a critical business process.

The context of choice has changed

But this does not mean that nothing has changed for B2B SaaS. Rather, it is not the essence of the ICP that has changed, but the context of choice. Clients are now more likely to ask: why should I buy a ready-made SaaS product instead of quickly building something myself or with the help of AI tools? That is why messaging needs to become sharper and more precise. I would not say that positioning needs to be radically reinvented. Rather, it needs to return to its roots: a clear understanding of the segment, its jobs-to-be-done, the business processes the product covers, the operational risks it removes, and the outcome the client receives.

The more clearly a B2B SaaS company explains what job it does for the client, why this cannot be reduced to “quickly writing code,” where its reliability, expertise, and business impact come from, the more seriously it will be considered — even in the middle of the vibe coding hype.

Product marketing is king again.

Because in this new reality, the winner is not the one who talks the loudest about AI, but the one who explains most precisely why their product is needed by the business.