SaaSletter - All Things AI - Redpoint, G2, ICONIQ + More
Plus Cloud Ratings B2B AI Interest Index for March 2026
Excited to be publishing again → we’ve been heads down building new products at Cloud Ratings, so apologies for the hiatus. Before getting into our core coverage, we will re-highlight some recent podcasts of ours:
“Where Vertical AI Wins” - Patrick McGovern - Bowery Capital
SPOTIFY | APPLE | OTHER PODCAST PLATFORMS| VIDEO
“Engineering Management in the Age of AI” - Karim Fanous
SPOTIFY | APPLE | OTHER PODCAST PLATFORMS| VIDEO
Redpoint Ventures - Market Update
Redpoint (h/t Logan Bartlett, Adil Bhatia, and Lydia Day) made a strong contribution to 2026’s “State of _” genre with their Market Update (69 slides, our 13 key slide excerpts). Selected highlights below:
G2 On AI x Software Buyer Search
"How AI Search is Rewiring B2B Software Buying" - from G2 / Tim Sanders + co (n=1,076 B2B decision makers)
#1 - Godard Abel was right on our earlier podcast - AI expands the shortlist! (direct clip linked). Anecdotally, in our own buying AI, both G2’s Chatbot and Gemini have identified vendors we otherwise would not have considered.
#2 - huge volume of insights in the report - like 71%(!) of the B2B software funnel starts with a chat prompt - especially at the CMO level. Huge implications for monitoring, content, attribution, pipeline visibility, and more!
ICONIQ 2026 GTM Benchmark Update
A largely positive "2026 State of GTM" from ICONIQ:
- Consistently improving win rates, an important sign relative to consistent win rate declines in 2025.
- Those challenging closing rates meant forecasts and pipeline coverage were significantly strained in 2025 (see slides from our Cloud Ratings’ “2025 Value Creation Summit”)
- Back to ICONIQ, positive trends in cost/opportunity and sales cycles.
Curated Content
Ciridae (an AI workflow architecture start-up, backed by A16Z and General Catalyst; h/t Felix Stocker & Jai Kondapalli) released an interesting AI transformation explorer, by sector and even by private equity firm. We made a quick recut to visualize the findings:
Sapphire Ventures (h/t Kevin Burke + co) March Market Memo included good coverage of AI agents…
along with this Stratechery “Agents Over Bubbles” take.
Apoorv Agrawal from Altimeter on “The Economics of Generative AI”
March 2026 B2B AI Interest Index from Cloud Ratings
We’ve updated our Cloud Ratings B2B AI Interest Index through March 2026 - full slides below:
Thematic Category Interest (n = 47 sub-categories tracked - i.e. “manufacturing AI” or “supply chain AI”) rebounded and reversed poor winter trends (while noting inherent seasonal lows in December).
Bellwether Microsoft Copilot continues to stay at a higher plateau. Other “Blue Chips” (i.e., Hubspot, ServiceNow) remain range bound.
SaaS Incumbents (n=340: the same 340 vendors tracked in our top-of-the-funnel focused, forward-looking SaaS Demand Index) performed strongly in Q1 2026.
About Cloud Ratings
In mid-2024, we announced a research partnership with G2 - more here:
with this slide showing how our G2-enhanced Quadrants (like our recent Sales Compensation Software) release, this business of software newsletter you are reading, our podcasts, and our True ROI practice area all fit within our modern analyst firm:
Welcome back!