Yes, SaaStr AI Annual 2026 Crushed It. But We Had to Rebuild Our Entire Customer Base for AI.

SaaStr AI Annual 2026 was our best at least since 2022, and in many ways, a refounding of the events as part of the refounding of SaaStr AI itself for the age of AI Agents in B2B. Everyone building AI agents together. Bigger and far, far better energy than 2023-2025. The CEOs who came who’d been to SaaStr Ai 2026 told me it was the best and most useful one in many years. (All but two at least 😉

But it was far harder than it might have looked. Why?

We had to rebuild almost our entire sponsor / customer base in 12 months.

Not upsell. Not refresh. Not expand. Rebuild. You might have to, too.

Almost All The Pre-AI Sponsors, The Old SaaS … Churned

We had 78 of that larger Gold-to-Diamond sponsors at SaaStr AI Annual 2026. That sounds strong but of those:

Only 15 (about 19%) also sponsored 2025.
63 sponsors (81%) were net-new to SaaStr AI Annual, our highest ever. Good, but
48 of our 2025 sponsors did not come back. Also our highest ever 🙁

Four out of five sponsors at our flagship event this year were companies that didn’t sponsor 12 months ago. Half of last year’s sponsors were gone.

Put differently, the SaaSpocolypse hit us, too.

The fact we could lose ~75% of our sponsor base and still grow SaaStr AI Annual 2026, it almost sounds crazy. But that’s what happened, because the entire customer base for B2B budget shifted under our feet.

The Churn Wasn’t Random. It Was a Category Collapse.

10K and I went through all 48 sponsors who didn’t come back:

40 of 48 (83%) were classic pre-AI B2B or legacy services firms.
8 of 48 (17%) were AI-native.

The B2B leaders with huge AI tailwinds like Google Cloud came back. The AI B2B leaders like Replit. Vercel. Lovable stepped up.

The churn wasn’t random, and it wasn’t evenly distributed. It was almost entirely on the old-SaaS side of the floor. The AI-native sponsors who came in 2025 mostly stayed.

Stack that against the inbound side:

63 brand-new sponsors in 2026, the overwhelming majority AI-first. And a record.
40 pre-AI sponsors gone.

Net: the “old B2B” share of our sponsor floor collapsed from majority to minority in a single year. Not over a decade. In one show cycle.

The same math is probably happening in your customer base, whether you’ve measured it yet or not.

Why the Pre-AI Sponsors Quietly Left

If you walked our 2025 floor and our 2026 floor side by side, you’d notice some big absences. Companies that 18 months ago were spending $250K+ on booths, lanyards, and happy hours: gone. Not because they hated us. Not because the event got worse.

But because:

Their growth slowed. The 30%+ NRR engine B2B companies of 2021 are now grinding out 10–15%, and the marketing budgets reflect it.
The CMO got fired. Or the seat went unfilled for 9 months. Or “events” got moved under demand gen with a 40% cut.
They’re cutting everything that isn’t pipeline-attributable in 90 days. Sponsorships rarely score well on that test, fairly or not.
Some are just done. Quietly winding down field marketing entirely. A few are quietly winding down, period.

This isn’t a SaaStr problem. It’s a category problem. If you aren’t grabbing AI budget, you aren’t growing.

Where the New Sponsors Came From

The flip side is what made the show work. 63 brand-new sponsors, and the overwhelming majority of them are AI-first.

The new floor looked nothing like 2024 or even 2025 really. Replit’s Vibe Coding Lounge. Lovable’s networking lounge. Harvey. Cohere. Vercel. Relevance AI. Vivun. Monaco AI. OpenRouter. People.ai. Plaud. Aurasell. Attention.com. Momentum. Qualified going huge. Kintsugi. Larridin. Roam doing the Founders Lounge.

These are companies that mostly didn’t exist at sponsor scale in 2024. Some literally didn’t exist as companies at all. And in 2026 they’re writing $50K, $100K, $250K checks because their customers are at SaaStr AI Annual.

The renewals we did keep are also telling. Google Cloud went Diamond again. Okta. Rippling. G2. Justworks. Remote. Artisan. Firebolt. Flatfile. The ones who stayed are mostly companies that have an authentic AI story or a horizontal platform play. The pure-play “we sell software to mid-market sales teams” sponsor of 2022 is the one that simply disappeared.

The Hard Lessons for Everyone Running Last Year’s Playbook

This matters even if you never plan to run an B2B community or event.

Because your customer base is doing the same thing. All the marketing budget, all the incremental budget, is going to AI.

The companies writing checks in 2026 and 2027 are mostly:

AI-native companies spending aggressively to land mindshare.
Old-guard companies that successfully repositioned around AI.
Infrastructure plays (data, compute, dev tools) riding the AI capex wave.

If your 2026 pipeline still looks like your 2023 pipeline, you have a problem you may not see yet.

Rebuilding Your Entire Customer Base for The Age of AI is Brutal. But It Can Be Done.

The old customer base is shrinking even as AI spend explodes. It happened to us, too. The new one is being born. And if you wait until your renewal numbers tell you, it’s already too late.

We rebuilt almost our entire partner and sponsor base in 12 months. And with just 3 humans, a dog and 20 AI Agents. You may need to rebuild your customer base in the next 6-24 months, too.

The good news? It’s possible. We just did it. And the new base is, honestly, better.

See you at SaaStr AI Annual 2027 next May. The floor’s going to look different again.

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