Buyer-Side Evidence: Qualitate's Full AI Disruption Report — HubSpot Most-Displaced Vendor, ServiceNow/Workday/Adobe in the "Flat-Budget Waiting Room," Anthropic the Top Winner
The full Qualitate AI Disruption Report (published September 22, 2026) — promised in the August 13 preview built on 2,000+ buyer discussions — is now out, based on 4,800+ senior tech buyer discussions comparing the 1H '26 and 2H '25 Enterprise Applications studies. It is the strongest buyer-side quantification to date of AI-native displacement of incumbent enterprise software.
Headline numbers
- AI now drives 27% of planned vendor spend decreases and 18% of planned churn in 1H '26 — both up about 10 percentage points from the prior study. "Plans for AI-driven disruption appeared in 9% of Qualitate's discussions with enterprise software buyers in 1H '26. Six months earlier, it appeared in just 3%."
- The most common displacement pattern: "adoption of a frontier model and scaling back current spend on incumbent tools." When organizations adopt frontier models, outcomes split 43% spend decrease / 41% flattened budget / 17% churn — "Buyers often use Claude or ChatGPT to handle part of a job without replacing the incumbent vendor."
- Buyers cut before they remove: spend decreases remain more common than churn because buyers "trim a tool's budget before removing it."
- Category level: marketing & adtech and sales tools & commerce posted the largest increases in AI-driven displacement between 2H '25 and 1H '26; customer service posted the largest increase in AI-tied flat spending.
Vendor-level: who's hit, and how
- HubSpot recorded the most AI-driven displacement in the peer set. A buyer quoted in the report: "I rebuilt my pipeline directly from Snowflake data on Claude, and I found that UI to be more useful than HubSpot. In the future, we plan to decrease spend as we move towards more custom tooling." — Head of Partnerships, Financial Services & Insurance, Small Business, Netherlands (report page)
- Figma and UiPath also suffer frequent AI-driven displacement. Another buyer: "I think AI is going to basically eat the lunch of a lot of these pre-existing, established tools like Figma…I know Claude has built-in design skills and features and capabilities. Our need for wireframing is not that robust." This is a notable tension with Figma's Q1 2026 financial re-acceleration (see Figma: Re-accelerating to 46% Growth and Proving the Viability of AI Credit Monetization in Q1 2026) — buyer displacement intent leads P&L damage, so strong reported growth does not refute displacement pressure.
- The "flat-budget waiting room": usage-adjusted, ServiceNow, Workday, Adobe, and HubSpot recorded the most AI-driven spend stagnation — "Buyers have paused new spending without removing systems that sit deep in the enterprise stack. This may be the stage before displacement." Critically for the ServiceNow bull case (see ServiceNow: AI Disruption Fears Met by "AI Control Tower" Governance Pivot, Strong Q2 2026 Backlog, and $1B AI ACV): "ServiceNow stands out because nearly all of its AI-related pressure comes from flattened budgets rather than displacement."
- The August preview's flags (HubSpot seats flat; monday.com and OpenText as legacy displacement candidates) are consistent with the full report's vendor ranking.
Who wins the displaced dollars
"Anthropic is the most frequent beneficiary, followed by OpenAI. Microsoft and Google form the next tier." This corroborates the enterprise-adoption crossover tracked in Anthropic Overtakes OpenAI in Enterprise AI Adoption — Claude Code Drives the Crossover — displaced SaaS budget is flowing first to model providers, not (yet) to a new SaaS incumbent.
What it means for evaluating the landscape
Displacement is now a measurable, fast-compounding flow (3% → 9% of buyer discussions in six months), and it progresses in stages: flat budget → spend decrease → churn. Vendors with deep-stack entrenchment (ServiceNow, Workday, Adobe) are currently in the flattening stage; front-office tools with shallower moats (HubSpot, Figma, UiPath) are already seeing displacement-level intent. The beneficiary is overwhelmingly the model layer (Anthropic/OpenAI), plus buyers' own vibe-coded custom tooling.