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The Silver Tsunami & The Future of Services

The biggest buying opportunity in a generation — or a value trap? Why AI autonomous agents may make most Silver Tsunami acquisitions un-buyable at current multiples, and where the real opportunity actually lies.

Angus Birchall
The Silver Tsunami & The Future of Services

The Silver Tsunami - The Greatest Wealth Transfer in History

I spent the last year running Go-To-Market for 1848 Ventures, an AI Venture Studio, where we built AI-native software to help America’s 35M small-to-medium sized businesses operate more efficiently.

The 1848 thesis was rooted in the concept of the “Silver Tsunami”: a massive, emergent demographic and economic transformation that will see the boomer generation retire, and the 10M businesses they own transfer to a new generation of owners.

As conventional wisdom holds, it is expected to lead to the largest wealth transfer in history - with ~$14T in transactional value, and 62M US jobs at stake. The banking company Mercury recently wrote a detailed piece on this, highlighting–among other things–that only 30% of family owned businesses transition to the second generation.

The gist is that The Silver Tsunami represents the biggest buying opportunity in a generation for savvy operators who want to transition out of white collar corporate gigs, and into existing businesses, orphaned by their aging ownership that offer immediate cash flows, proven models, and established customers on day one, avoiding the failure rate associated with starting new ventures.

While the opportunity is clear when viewed through the lens of traditional acquisition comps, the reality is that what made these companies successful over the first 30 or 40 years of their existence may not be enough to help them survive in the next 10.

AI, and specifically autonomous agents, are coming for these traditional service businesses, whose moats have been built on specialized knowledge, and barriers to entry. Those barriers will crumble in a world where artificial intelligence can learn that specialized knowledge and deliver trusted outcomes at massive discounts to the service providers that have owned those industries for the past half century.

I wrote this think-piece to share my perspective on what’s changing right under the feet of these businesses, and where I see the real opportunity lying in the AI transformation on our doorstep.

A SaaS-based Approach to SMB Acquisition

Facilitating the acquisition of SMBs is not an entirely new concept at all. The Private Equity Roll-up model has been around for almost 60 years, and has roots in the late 19th century industrial era.

What’s relatively new is the approach taken by emerging software companies to modernize and scale this transactional model, making it more accessible to the everyday upper-middle class, white collar operator. A few approaches that exist today, include:

  • Marketplaces like bizbuysell.com or acquire.com exist to facilitate business acquisition transactions that are focused on the long tail of supply and demand, with limited frills. Imagine a Craigslist apartment listing, but for businesses.
  • Baton was developed by my former Google colleague, Chat Joglekar. He’s betting that the transition needs better infrastructure, improved services, and more features for buyers and sellers. Imagine a Zillow apartment listing, but for businesses.
  • Two talented 1848 founders, Rom and Nick, launched Evermark to enable demand-side, Entrepreneurship Through Acquisitions-focused MBA grads, with better data and buying signals. Imagine a Sotheby's apartment listing, but for businesses.

Each of these ventures is taking a traditional SaaS-based approach to the opportunity - build an online marketplace, reduce friction, and layer on proprietary data to facilitate more and better transactions.

AI’s Impact on The SMB Asset Class

Building SaaS-based marketplaces for new types of transactions is a clear and proven business model. No question. And I’m certain each of these ventures will be successful following the playbook, especially while leveraging AI tools.

But what of the assets themselves–the businesses being transacted? The broad assumption at play in the “greatest buying opportunity in history” thesis appears to be that the market comps of a law firm, accounting practice, or dentist’s office will remain constant for the foreseeable future.

Mercury’s article sees that as a buying opportunity – existing, defensible high-margin businesses where savvy, white-collar operators can easily improve efficiency to increase EBITDA margins, without considering the world in which these new operators are hurling themselves into.

What’s missing in the analysis is an acknowledgement of what’s happening to the asset-class itself. The thing buyers are investing in is facing a massive disruption that may upend the economic fundamentals that made that asset so valuable over its first 50 years of existence.

An emerging counterpoint is that AI’s impact on SMBs will be seen less in transforming how businesses are operated, and more in the actual delivery of the services small businesses offer.

VC Consensus on The SMB Opportunity:

While the acquisition entrepreneurs are chasing multiples based on potentially outdated comps, no fewer than 7 venture funds have placed massive bets on a fundamental idea: that services businesses will become the new software.

In just six months, Sequoia, Index, Bain, Insignia, Coatue, Craft, and General Catalyst have put collectively billions of dollars into startup theses that propose autonomous AI will be able to deliver business outcomes that are as equally effective, efficient, and trusted as those delivered by humans.

What they’re all saying – in their own words – is that the next wave of software won’t enable services to be delivered more efficiently, it will deliver the outcomes itself. AI won’t be better tools, it will be better services.

And what they’re also saying–more in my words–is that in many sectors, by the time businesses change hands, AI may have made most of them un-buyable at current multiples, un-ownable in their current form, or in some cases un-needed entirely.

If they’re right–and I believe they are–the transition of businesses from Boomers to Gen X & Y acquirers may look a lot more like a washout than a tsunami.

It suggests the real opportunity of the Silver Tsunami is in transforming the way that SMBs deliver services, expanding the pie for SMB service providers with better outcomes, as opposed to simply optimizing operating margins from existing services delivered to existing customers.

The Real Future of Services

This is what General Catalyst calls the Future of Services, or the AI-Enabled Roll-Up, and they’ve been working on it for years.

It’s a twist on the legacy PE roll-up model that pairs a dramatic improvement in service delivery from autonomous agents with strategic acquisitions to capitalize on the opportunity they see – not a transfer of assets, but a transformation of service delivery through a combination of Capability-Led Growth and Direct Ownership.

Their focus so far? Eudia, which they launched to tackle the $1.05T opportunity in law firms; Titan MSP, to address the fragmented $300B global MSP opportunity; Crescendo, which they incubated to focus on the $460B contact center industry, and Long Lake and Dwelly, which aim to enable the global in-home, residential, business, and infrastructure services businesses.

GC isn’t replicating the old PE model – buy, cost-strip, and flip. They see a future in which the combination of directly-owned services businesses delivering more and better outcomes for customers will allow them to return software-level margins on markets that are 10x the size.

The Broken B2B SaaS Pipeline

In the United States, over $80B annually is spent on marketing services, of which $35-50B is generated by small-to-medium-sized agencies (those with less than $50M in revenue). This services spend is massively fragmented – more than 85,000 digital advertising agencies exist in the US, the majority of which staff fewer than 10 employees.

This spend is further distributed across a range of specialized services including web development, conversion rate optimization, SEO, content creation, content distribution, CRM, lifecycle management, and paid media management.

As an addressable sub-segment, B2B SaaS companies alone spend $300-400M on agency services each year, not including internal growth marketing resources that coordinate and manage these service providers. And yet, few of them can answer the simple question: what works at driving pipeline growth?

This problem is rooted in the combination of legacy SaaS platforms, and the agency personnel charged with managing them. Platforms are siloed, integrate poorly, and–critically–lack consistent definitions for basic customer pipeline stages, and are incentivized to create independent attribution models. Agencies are staffed with low-level human employees who fumble with constantly changing, highly technical, and operationally burdensome systems that lack the creative appeal they signed up for.

A single B2B SaaS growth stack can include as many as 20 independent technologies, each requiring unique and specialized growth hires or agencies to stitch together an ultimately flawed picture of how their prospects become buyers, and how they can find more to do the same. Costs can quickly grow to $50K a month to manage this stack.

Put Your Pipeline on Autopilot

Here’s the good news. Each of those siloed SaaS platforms can be managed autonomously via API. Agents with clearly defined routines can be orchestrated to coordinate tasks between systems and themselves, mapped to the daily, weekly and monthly activities of a fully staffed, multi-channel growth team.

Rote execution — previously capped by individual expertise and hours — is now fully automatable, providing growth stack execution services that ingest signals, identify effective messages, campaigns, and platforms, and inform teams as to what is working and not.

Website development, A/B testing, copy changes, tracking code deployment, CRM form implementation, content creation, scheduling, and automation, platform distribution, pipeline lifecycle management, analytics and reporting can all effectively become optimized services, delivering the outcome that matters: pipeline transparency that scales efficiently.

For founders who've been sold on the promise of SaaS tools and agency partners — and watched both underdeliver — AI autopilots offer a compelling alternative. An autonomous service that runs the full growth stack, always on, at a fraction of the cost. It won't just reduce CAC. It will finally answer the question every B2B SaaS founder has been asking: what's actually working?

For the 85,000+ agencies navigating the AI disruption ahead, and the founders currently paying them — this is what the other side of the tsunami looks like. I'm building this in public. Follow along on LinkedIn — I'll share what's working, what's not, and what we're learning as we go.

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Sources & Links

VC POV Reading List (the 6):

  1. Sequoia — "Services-as-Software" (Julien Bek, March 5, 2026): https://www.sequoiacap.com/article/services-as-software/
  2. Index Ventures — Crosby (Contracts at the Speed of Business)
  3. Bain Capital Ventures — Crosby announcement
  4. Craft Ventures — "Why We Invested in Norm AI": https://www.craftventures.com/articles/why-we-invested-in-norm-ai
  5. Coatue — "Our Partnership with Norm AI": https://www.coatue.com/blog/press/our-partnership-with-norm-ai
  6. Insignia — "Beyond the Autopilot": https://review.insignia.vc/2026/03/17/autopilot/

GC:

Ecosystem:

Silver Tsunami Data:

Marketing Services Ratio Data (VERIFIED):

Supporting:

About the Author

Angus Birchall

Formerly an operator at Google, Facebook, Meta, and 1848 Ventures, he is now the Founder and Managing Partner of Elsinore Ventures, an AI-first advisory firm.