Zip Finds AI Spend Is Increasing But Isn’t Causing A SaaSpocalypse

Enterprise AI spending is surging. Thursday, AI procurement platform Zip released the second edition of its Enterprise AI Index, an in-depth study of enterprise AI spend, and found that AI rose from 0.4% to 2.7% of approved purchasing in a year.

The report analyzed $18 billion in real purchase data from the past 12 months, looking at the million dollar contracts companies sign for AI tools like Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor, and discovered that the typical company’s AI spend grew 202%.

Zip’s study comes as Gartner estimates worldwide spending on will reach $2.7 trillion in 2026, an increase of 45% year-over-year, with the biggest area of spending being hyperscalers and service providers purchasing AI-optimized servers.

Is AI Spend Causing A SaaSpocalypse?

Throughout 2026 there have been concerns that the rise of AI agents will come at the expense of traditional software platforms in the form of a saaspocalypse, and devaluation of software stocks. Zip’s study offers a rebuttal to the saaspocalypse narrative, indicating that while AI spend is increasing, it isn’t coming out of software budgets.

For instance, the study finds that rather than AI replacing software, the typical AI-heavy company raised its software spend by 17%, compared to 5% among the rest of companies. The companies growing AI spend fastest also raised software spend by 12%, and paid 6% more when they renewed existing software vendors.

The findings show similar themes to Menlo Ventures fourth annual The State of Enterprise AI report, released in November, which found out of $176.8 billion AI deployment spend, 55% was funded by new budgets, while just 22% came from software budgets.

Tim Law, research director of AI and Automation at the IDC also pushes back against the saaspocalypse narrative, suggesting that the “IDC’s research indicates that the SaaSpocalypse was overstated,” with the competitive moats of enterprise providers proving more resilient than initially thought.