How Vertical SaaS Can Capitalize on the Disruption and Pace of AI

The 2025 Mainsail Product & Technology Summit highlighted our portfolio companies’ efforts to embrace AI to drive product innovation, customer impact and productivity, and it challenged them to elevate their use of agentic AI in both product and engineering workflows.

Harnessing AI for a Competitive Edge

This year’s summit was hosted by Julio Palacio, a former CTO/CPTO at two Mainsail portfolio companies and now CTO at Mainsail Partners, and Barnaby Dorfman, CTO/CPO Advisor on AI Strategy to Mainsail’s portfolio companies. Together, they emphasized the strategic opportunities to harness AI for a competitive edge, given the established positions that vertical B2B SaaS providers have in their customer markets versus new AI-first startups.

Attendees walked away with insights on how to capitalize on the disruptive innovation and pace of AI, while overcoming the classic innovator’s dilemma, including:

Lean into your vertical focus. Many vertical SaaS businesses solve “unsexy” problems. That’s a strength—it means less competition and more opportunity to innovate quietly.
Assess your talent. Do you have the right people to lead your AI journey? That might mean upskilling rather than replacing them.
Focus on customer outcomes. AI enables less deterministic workflows. Move beyond feature checklists. What real-world impact are you driving for customers?
Redesign your innovation structure. The traditional software development lifecycle SDLC is too slow. Agile got us from years to months. Now we need to move from months and weeks to days.
Explore emerging technologies. Tools like Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) are gaining traction fast. Cursor already supports it, and there’s a growing ecosystem of connectors.

AI Use Cases in the Mainsail Software Portfolio

Most importantly, the summit was a chance for product and tech leaders to turn to their peers for AI use cases. Sean Eby, CTO at ServiceCore, offered a tactical look at implementation, detailing how his team rolled out Cursor, trained engineers, and began tracking usage and value. He emphasized the importance of education, experimentation, and sharing learnings via workshops and Slack channels. Sean also echoed Barnaby in underscoring that AI won’t replace developers—it will empower them. With the right tools and mindset, teams can accelerate delivery, improve quality, and gain a competitive edge.

Adriano Macri from Rentvine shared his company’s multi-pronged AI integration strategy, designed to streamline property management workflows. For example, Rentvine applies generative AI to help customers create marketing headlines and property descriptions, saving time and helping them fill rental vacancies. A functional AI assistant also enables natural language commands to locate information across the entire platform and pre-fill forms, allowing customers to quickly perform complex tasks. These innovations help enhance efficiency, reduce manual effort, and improve user satisfaction.

Product & Engineering Strategy Breakout Sessions

Breakout sessions at the 2025 Mainsail Product & Technology Summit also gave participants many opportunities to share their own strategies and challenges across several key areas, including:

Product Strategy & Leadership: Case study and working session led by Johny Wudel, former COO and head of Product at JobNimbus, on outcomes-focused product development.
Road Mapping Strategies: Advanced frameworks and collaborative techniques to build strategic, actionable product roadmaps and gain cross-functional buy-in.
Product Prioritization: Using structured methods like RICE and MoSCoW to make data-informed, goal-aligned feature decisions.
Voice of the Customer: How to turn customer and market insights into prioritized, impactful product improvements.
Building & Scaling a Bootstrapped Organization: How to create a strong engineering org with limited resources by leveraging open-source tools, automation and culture-focused hiring.
Best Practices for M&A Add-Ons: Technical and cultural integration post-acquisition, emphasizing planning, risk mitigation and momentum.
Managing Outsourced Teams: Techniques to select, onboard, and manage distributed teams while maintaining quality and collaboration, tracking performance and protecting IP.

Thank you to all our participants, speakers, breakout facilitators and technology advisors for driving productive conversations and takeaways for all who attended this year’s summit.

This content piece has been prepared solely for informational purposes. The content piece does not constitute an offer to sell or the solicitation of an offer to purchase any security. The information in this content piece is not presented with a view to providing investment advice with respect to any security, or making any claim as to the past, current or future performance thereof, and Mainsail Management Company, LLC (“Mainsail” or “Mainsail Partners”) expressly disclaims the use of this content piece for such purposes.
The information herein is based on the author’s opinions and views and there can be no assurance other third-party analyses would reach the same conclusions as those provided herein. The information herein is not and may not be relied on in any manner as, legal, tax, business or investment advice.
Third-party images, logos, and references included herein are provided for illustrative purposes only. Inclusion of such images, logos, and references does not imply affiliation with or endorsement for or by such firms or businesses.

Certain information contained in this content piece has been obtained from published and non‐published sources prepared by other parties, which in certain cases have not been updated through the date hereof. While such information is believed to be reliable for the purposes of this content piece, neither Mainsail nor the webinar participants assume any responsibility for the accuracy or completeness of such information and such information has not been independently verified by any of them. The content piece will not be updated or otherwise revised to reflect information that subsequently becomes available, or circumstances existing or changes occurring after the date hereof, or for any other reason.
Certain information contained herein constitutes “forward-looking statements,” which can be identified by the use of terms such as “may,” “will,” “should,” “could,” “would,” “predicts,” “potential,” “continue,” “expects,” “anticipates,” “projects,” “future,” “targets,” “intends,” “plans,” “believes,” “estimates” (or the negatives thereof) or other variations thereon or comparable terminology. Forward looking statements are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties, which are beyond the control of Mainsail. Actual results, performance, prospects or opportunities could differ materially from those expressed in or implied by the forward-looking statements. Additional risks of which Mainsail is not currently aware also could cause actual results to differ. In light of these risks, uncertainties and assumptions, you should not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. The forward-looking events discussed in this content piece may not occur. Mainsail undertakes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.
No representation, warranty or undertaking, express or implied, is given as to the accuracy or completeness of the information or opinions contained in the enclosed materials by Mainsail and no liability is accepted by such persons for the accuracy or completeness of any such information or opinions. For additional important disclosures, please click here..