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2 Minute Read

One Chart That Shows You What's Actually Happening in the AI Economy

Every once in a while, a single data point breaks through the noise, and crystallizes exactly where the AI Age stands. In today's short read, we show you one chart that should change the way you think about every vendor in the public affairs industry.

What You're Looking At

The below chart comes courtesy of the venture capitalist Jeremiah Owyang. It's just three bars, but it shows you exactly what is happening in the AI economy.

The chart shows average SaaS company revenue organized into three categories:

• AI-followers and AI-forward organizations—legacy companies at least trying to catch up with AI. Their average revenue per employee? $240K That's barely enough to pay one fully loaded mid-level salary, and a recipe for disaster if you care about profitability.
  
  
• AI-first companies—legacy organizations who have embraced AI in most aspects of their operations. Their average revenue per employee? $524K. Much better, but still barely scalable when you account for legacy infrastructure costs, salaries, and out-of-date technology that these organizations are now trying to retrofit.
  
  
• And finally, AI-native startups. Companies who have been built with AI from the ground up. Their revenue per employee? $2.2 million—a full 10X over the average. Same economy. Same markets. Wildly different results.

Sources: public records and leanaileaderboard.com

What Happens Next To Legacy Vendors

The term the tech world has coined for this new reality is "Saaspocolypse." It's a portmanteau, but it's also a forecast. A forecast for what happens next to legacy vendors.

Sir Martin Sorrell — the man who built WPP into a 100,000-person holding company was recently asked whether legacy agency structures could survive the AI era. Here's what he said:

"Let's be blunt: this is a managed cost contraction, not a transformation. You cannot pivot a legacy structure, with well over 100,000+ employees trained for a labor-based era." — Sir Martin Sorrell, PRmoment India, February 2026

WPP's share price is down 60% over the last year. The Omnicom-IPG merger shed tens of thousands of jobs before regulators even approved it. This isn't transformation. It's triage.

What This Means For Public Affairs

There's one glaring implication in this data for any public affairs practitioner. Your vendors, your tech stack, your communications infrastructure—if they are built on legacy platforms, they are also priced accordingly.

Which category of company do you think can offer you the most cost-effective solutions? The ones barely paying their bills? Or the ones generating 10x revenue per employee?

The question isn't whether the AI economy is real. The question is what side of the divide do you want to be on.

One Way To Operationalize This Email

🔱 Audit your vendors, tech stack, and communications infrastructure. Are they built on legacy models, or AI-native tools? If the former, you're overpaying, and losing to competitors who have embraced AI-native solutions.

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