In a development that absolutely no one with stock options saw coming, a Harvard Business Review article authored by a venture capitalist with investments in AI companies has concluded that AI is "inevitable" and will definitely disrupt enterprise software—particularly the kind of software that competes with companies in his portfolio. The peer review process worked flawlessly: the peers were investors, and they reviewed their portfolios. They approved.

The landmark piece, titled "How Gen AI Could Disrupt SaaS—and Change the Companies That Use It," arrived this week bearing the revolutionary thesis that artificial intelligence will transform workplaces by eliminating the need for the people who work in them. "Administrative teams in HR, finance, and IT will shrink or redeploy, freeing talent for innovation," the authors write, introducing what labor historians are calling "the layoff euphemism to end all layoff euphemisms."

Deep Nishar, the article's lead author, disclosed in a footnote written in font size normally reserved for pharmaceutical side effects that he holds investments in Anthropic, Figma, Glean, and Slack. He was joined by Nitin Nohria, former dean of Harvard Business School, whose presence adds the academic credibility required to transform "I would like my investments to increase in value" into "this is simply how the world works."

"This is not a conflict of interest," explained a spokesperson for conflicts of interest. "This is the interest."

Perhaps most striking is the article's repeated reference to workers as "the humans." The phrase appears with the clinical detachment of an exterminator discussing an infestation. "Change management, especially for the humans who will be affected," the authors note, in a sentence that reads like a software patch note. Not "employees." Not "people." Not "colleagues." The humans.

Somewhere, a Roomba just felt seen.

The article's core argument centers on the transformation from "systems of workflow" to "systems of work"—a distinction that, upon close reading, translates to "software that needs humans to operate it" versus "software that doesn't." Companies like Klarna have already announced plans to sunset major platforms like Salesforce and Workday. Hitachi, the article notes approvingly, deployed AI across 120,000 employees in just eight weeks.

For context, eight weeks is less time than most companies spend deciding on a new logo font. It's shorter than a standard HR investigation into who's been stealing lunches from the break room fridge. The previous IT system took four years to implement. This one took less time than onboarding a single intern properly.

When reached for comment, the 120,000 employees said: [RESPONSE GENERATED BY AGENTIC HR SYSTEM - ORIGINAL PERSONNEL DEPRECATED]

The authors urge business leaders to establish "governance frameworks" immediately. Reading between the lines, this translates to: install the scapegoat before the crisis. The framework's primary function, sources confirm, is to ensure that when the AI inevitably approves 47 ghost employees, authorizes a $3M purchase order for "decorative asbestos," or terminates the entire Phoenix office via push notification, there will be a clear, documented chain of accountability leading directly to a human being who can be fired on television.

Good governance, as it turns out, isn't about preventing disasters. It's about pre-positioning the blame.

"Local economies will feel these shifts," the article acknowledges, in the same tone one might say "Pompeii residents felt some volcanic shifts." Entire regions built around software services—the Bangalores, the Austins, the Research Triangles—will "transition" from thriving tech hubs to cautionary tales featured in future Harvard Business Review articles titled "What We Can Learn From The Collapse of [Your City Here]."

The word "inevitable" appears in this article like a load-bearing beam. It does important work: transforming decisions into destiny, choices into physics, "we're doing this" into "the universe is doing this." You cannot argue with inevitability. You cannot unionize against inevitability. Inevitability has no HR department, no customer service line, no appeals process. Your job isn't disappearing because of decisions made by people who will profit from those decisions. It's disappearing because of inevitability. And who could be mad at that?

"Legacy software encodes best practices from past implementation projects," the article explains. "Generative AI invents best practices in real time."

Translation: Why preserve decades of hard-won institutional knowledge when you can have an AI hallucinate new procedures every 45 seconds? The employee who spent 30 years learning why you never run payroll on a Tuesday during Mercury retrograde? Freed. The engineer who understood which database column would crash the entire system if you breathed on it? Liberated. In their place: a confident chatbot that invents protocols with the unearned certainty of a first-year consultant and the institutional memory of a goldfish.

The article concludes with a stirring call to action: "Just as software ate the world over the past 15 years, generative AI will now transform the software that shaped today's organizations—and, in doing so, redefine how we work for decades to come."

First, software ate the world. Now AI eats the software. Soon, agentic AI will eat that AI. Then quantum AI will eat the agentic AI. It's disruption all the way down—a perpetual ouroboros of innovation, a snake eating its own tail while a VC stands nearby whispering, "This is actually good for the snake."

The entire economy is now a never-ending game of technological musical chairs, except each round removes both a chair and a player, and the music is a podcast about hustle culture.

"This disruption will have ripple effects far beyond software companies," the authors note, in what may be the only accurate prediction in the entire piece. Indeed. Some ripples are more like tsunamis. And the people on shore—the humans, as the article calls them—may soon experience what it truly means to be liberated.

At press time, the article had been shared 47,000 times on LinkedIn, primarily by people adding "Thoughts?" to the top of their posts.