SaaStr AI 2026 is running 132% of where we were at this point last year. Tickets are up. Sponsors are up. See everyone in San Francisco, May 12-14.
We’ve got the best of the best coming — Databricks, Replit, Agentforce, Lovable, Google Cloud, and so much more.
It should be a moment to just celebrate, right?
Except here’s what I can’t stop thinking about: if we had just kept selling the same way we did in 2023, we would have been down roughly -80% in sponsor revenue and -50% in attendees. Not flat. Not down a little. Cratered.
Instead we’re +132%.
That delta — between +132% and what could have been -46% or worse — is the whole story. And damn it if it wasn’t hard. And I think it applies to a lot of you, too.
We Lost Almost 100% of Our Non-AI Sponsors
Let me be direct about what happened on the sponsor side, because it’s jarring even for me to say out loud.
We basically lost 100% of our non-AI sponsors from the 2018-2023 era. Almost all of them. They didn’t cut back. They didn’t negotiate harder. They cut their budgets to nothing. The traditional B2B software vendors — the ones who built their go-to-market around events, content, and community — pulled out entirely. As their growth slowed in 2023-2025, they disappeared.
The sponsors still with us? Almost entirely companies that have, in one way or another, become AI companies. Google Cloud is a great example. They’re not just a cloud vendor anymore — they’re an AI infrastructure company, and they’re leaning in hard. Same with most of our Diamond sponsors: Artisan, Monaco, Replit. These are AI-first or AI-native businesses.
The era of “SaaS company sponsors top SaaS conference” is over. It’s now “AI company partners with #1 B2B + AI conference.” That sounds like a small semantic distinction. It is not.
And Attendees Are Up — But Not From Where You’d Expect
Here’s the other thing that keeps me up at night in a good-and-bad-at-the-same-time way:
Attendance is way up. 132% overall. But we have fewer attendees from older B2B companies than we’ve ever had. The growth is coming from AI-native companies, AI-curious founders, developers building on top of AI infrastructure, and operators trying to figure out how to survive the transition.
The traditional pre-AI B2B buyer — VP of Sales at a 500-person SaaS company, Head of Customer Success at a Series B — they’re still out there, but there are fewer of them showing up. Their companies are in some form of existential re-evaluation. They’re not flying to the best conferences to learn how to level up (or even just to close new business, for real) right now.
The energy at SaaStr AI 2026 is going to be electric. But it’s a different crowd than 2022 or even 2024. It should be.
We Had to Find Our “AI Budget” Too
This is the part I want every founder and revenue leader reading this to really sit with.
To grow 32% net (and rebuild from what would have been -80%), we had to go find an entirely new pool of budget. We had to find the “AI budget.”
What does that mean in practice? It means:
- Who’s actually spending right now? AI-native companies flush with venture capital and revenue. Incumbents with dedicated AI transformation budgets. Infrastructure players fighting for developer mindshare. These are not the same buyers as 2023, even when it’s technically the same company.
- Where is the budget sitting? In many companies, the AI budget is separate from the marketing budget, the events budget, or the demand gen budget. It’s held by a Chief AI Officer, a transformation team, or sometimes directly by the CEO. If you’re pitching your product to the same buyer you always pitched, at the same budget line, you may be pitching someone who genuinely has nothing to spend.
- What’s the new value prop? Sponsoring SaaStr in 2023 was about reaching SaaS buyers. Sponsoring SaaStr AI in 2026 is about reaching the people building and deploying AI in B2B. Same conference, different reason to write the check. We had to re-articulate our value from scratch.
We didn’t just sell harder. We sold differently, to different people, for different reasons, against different budgets.
Most of Our Team Quit. That Part Nobody Talks About.
Here’s the part of the AI transformation story that almost nobody tells you honestly.
Yes, we replaced most of our team with 20+ AI agents. We went from 20+ employees down to 3 humans plus AI. And yes, the AI agents are generating over $1M in revenue and running huge chunks of the business. That part gets written about. People find it inspiring or alarming, depending on who they are.
What doesn’t get written about: almost all of our team quit when we had to reboot for the AI era.
Not because we laid them off. Not because we automated their jobs and showed them the door. They quit when things got harder. When we asked them to do more — to work differently, to learn new tools, to operate with the intensity that surviving and thriving in the Age of AI requires — most of them decided that wasn’t the deal they signed up for.
And get it. The ask was real. We were going through a genuine transformation, not a reorganization. The people who stayed had to do more, learn faster, and be okay with a lot of ambiguity. That’s a hard thing to ask of people who joined a different kind of company at a different moment.
But here’s what I’d tell you: if you really push your team to do what needs to be done in 2026, some of them — maybe many of them — will quit too. Or just .. not do it.
That’s not a failure of leadership. It’s a filter. The people who stay will be the ones who wanted to be part of what you’re building next, not what you built before. The people who leave were already, on some level, leaving.
This is hard to talk about because it sounds cold. It isn’t. Many of the people who left were talented, hardworking, and good. The transition was real and the ask was genuinely difficult. I don’t think less of anyone who decided it wasn’t for them.
But I also won’t pretend the transformation was clean and that everyone embraced it. They didn’t. And if you’re about to push your own company through something similar — a real AI-first pivot, a shift in how you sell, a rebuild of your go-to-market — you should go in clear-eyed that the team you have today may not be the team that comes out the other side. Some will rise to it. Some will self-select out. Very few will be neutral.
Plan for it. It’s not a reason to slow down. It’s just the reality.
If You’re Still Selling Like 2023, You Might Be Growing 0%
I don’t say this to be harsh. I say it because I lived it, and I almost didn’t see it coming fast enough.
If SaaStr had just gone back to our 2023 sponsor list, knocked on the same doors, pitched the same packages to the same contacts — we would have been down something like -80% in sponsor revenue. The math is brutal and simple: those companies don’t have the budget anymore, or they’ve reallocated it somewhere we weren’t looking.
The companies that are flat or declining right now often aren’t losing to competitors. They’re losing to budget category extinction. The thing they were selling into doesn’t exist at the same scale anymore.
Ask yourself honestly:
- Are your best customers from 2022-2023 still growing? Or are they in some version of “wait and see” mode on new spend?
- Is the budget you’re selling into still a real, funded budget line? Or has it been absorbed, paused, or replaced by an “AI transformation” initiative that you’re not part of?
- Have you rebuilt your ICP around who actually has money to spend in 2026 — or are you still targeting who had money to spend in 2023?
For us, the transition was non-negotiable. We’re an events and community business in B2B tech. Either we became the destination for AI in B2B, or we slowly became irrelevant. There wasn’t a third option.
The +132% Is Real. So Is the Work It Took to Get There.
I’m proud of where SaaStr AI 2026 is tracking. It should be the #1 gathering in the world on how to deploy AI for B2B. 10,000+ of the best of the best are coming because it’s what we care about. Artisan, Google Cloud, Monaco, Replit as Diamond Sponsors. Firebolt, Flatfile, G2 as Platinum. Lovable. Rippling. Qualified. People.ai. are going deep with us this year. And so many more incredible companies who are leaning into this moment.
But getting here wasn’t a victory lap on past success. It was a near-complete rebuild of who we sell to and why they buy.
The companies that show up at SaaStr AI 2026 in May — sponsors and attendees both — have figured something out that a lot of companies are still struggling with. They know where the budget is. They’ve repositioned for it. They’re growing.
If you haven’t done that work yet, the clock is ticking. The AI budget is real and it is large. But it doesn’t look like the budget you were selling into two years ago, and it’s not going to find you on its own.
See you May 12-14 in SF Bay.
SaaStr AI 2026 takes place May 12-14 in the San Francisco Bay Area. [Tickets and sponsorship info at saastr.com.]
