Results as a Service: The AI Shift That Kills Execution-Only Businesses

Rachel Woods breaks down a post from Dharmesh Shah, co-founder of HubSpot, about a business model shift he sees coming because of AI agents. The post, titled "AI Agents and The RaaS Revolution (Results As A Service)," argues that the SaaS era gave us tools and the agency era gave us execution. The next era gives us outcomes. Woods agrees and pushes the point further: most people are not thinking far enough ahead about what this means.

The core argument is straightforward. AI agents are getting better at executing tasks at practically unlimited scale. When execution becomes cheap and abundant, it stops being the thing worth paying for. What remains scarce is the expertise that tells the AI what to do and how to do it well. Businesses built on execution alone, without deep domain knowledge behind the work, are going to have a hard time justifying their value.

Shah's framing borrows a classic line: people do not want drills, they want holes. Applied to AI, the claim is that customers will increasingly skip the tool and the labor and pay directly for the result. If an AI agent can book your meetings, write your copy, or run your ad campaigns, the value is not in the agent itself. The value is in the strategy and expertise that make those outputs actually work.

Woods highlights that this is already visible in how agencies and consultancies operate. The ones thriving are not selling hours or deliverables. They are selling a specific outcome backed by proprietary knowledge. The ones struggling are competing on execution speed, which AI will always beat.

Key Takeaways

• AI agents commoditize execution. When anything can be done at scale for near-zero marginal cost, the differentiator becomes knowing what should be done.
• "Results as a Service" is the next business model layer. SaaS sold tools. Agencies sold labor. RaaS sells outcomes directly.
• Businesses without genuine domain expertise are the most exposed. If your value proposition is "we do the work," AI replaces you. If your value proposition is "we know what works," AI amplifies you.
• The leverage accrues to expertise holders. Whoever has the best playbook, framework, or proprietary insight gets to scale it infinitely through AI agents.