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Article The High-Stakes Reality of AI Exposure: Why Rising Wages are a Dealer’s Best Signal Read More

By Michael Quigley, President & Chief Strategy Officer, Co-Founder at Impel

We just wrapped up at NADA in Las Vegas and it was a whirlwind that felt like a victory lap for Vertical AI, and a reality check for traditional SaaS.

NADA 2026 was the best-attended show in its 100-year history with over 22,000 attendees. AI permeated every corner of the floor. Authentic or otherwise, it seemed every legacy SaaS company was suddenly declaring themselves an AI business. We’re living in the era of AI-everything. Eventually, we’ll drop the prefix just like we did with .com in the aughts, but for now, the buzz is deafening.

At this year’s NADA, Impel signed a record number of customers onto our AI Operating System. For the uninitiated: Impel’s platform uses (legit) AI agents to automate actual work within sales, service, parts, F&I, and accessories.

It’s no surprise that traditional SaaS businesses are rebranding as fast as they can. Imitation is flattery, but the recent “SaaS-pocalypse” sell-off in the Nasdaq—triggered by the launch of things like Claude Code—makes the urgency clear. When the cost of writing SaaS goes to zero, how do you stay relevant? That’s a question for another post.

Despite the noise, I think the predicted doom for SaaS is overstated. Will it disappear? Many think so, but history suggests a different path. Look at how the cloud affected Global Distribution Systems—the old tech stack travel agents used before sites like Expedia and Booking.com arrived. Legacy platforms like Amadeus didn’t vanish. Amadeus is still a public company with a healthy $20B+ market cap. It just isn’t the front door anymore.

I view AI, especially in vertical use cases like ours, as the new front door for existing SaaS platforms. We’ll co-exist, and the world isn’t necessarily zero-sum.

The ending isn’t as sad for SaaS as the doomers think, but the future for AI is certainly brighter. After all, Booking.com—travel’s newer front door—now trades at about 10x the value of Amadeus… 

.com and all.

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