In Jason Lemkin’s account of SaaStr’s break with Adobe Marketo, the formal cancellation is almost beside the point. SaaStr had already moved most of Marketo’s work elsewhere:

And once you do that once, you start asking the obvious question. We’ve now migrated almost all of Marketo’s functionality onto Salesforce. Not because Salesforce has better features. Because Salesforce has an API our agents can actually use. One day you look up and realize you’re paying $60K a year for a product you’ve already routed around.

That is the new B2B churn motion. It isn’t a feature bake-off. It’s an agent-operability test, and legacy vendors are failing it quietly, one migrated workflow at a time, before they ever show up on the churn report.

I do think this is where a lot of software, especially B2B software is headed. Even in my own day-to-day, I’m loathe to use tools that don’t allow me to connect to one of my AI agents. Zoom out to an enterprise context and now agent operability becomes a product-quality problem that can eventually lead to churn.

Lemkin’s advice:

If you build or run a B2B company, the Marketo story is a checklist of what not to become.

Make your product operable by an agent, now. Not next year. The question is no longer “is our UI good.” It’s “can a customer’s agent do real work against our API without a human babysitting it.” If the answer is no, you are already on a churn clock you can’t see. Webhooks, an SDK, an MCP server, clean auth, real history. This is table stakes in 2026.