The premise
Your company pays for dozens of SaaS subscriptions. Each one solves a narrow problem. Each one charges monthly, forever. Each one owns your data, sets its own limits, and raises prices when it wants to.
This model made sense when software was hard to build and expensive to run. It no longer is. Large language models can now execute the workflows that most SaaS products wrap in a GUI. The value was never the interface — it was the process underneath. And that process can now run as a local package, on your infrastructure, under your control.
ABWS — Agent-Based Workflow System — is the protocol that makes this real.
How it works
An ABWS package is a self-contained workflow definition. It specifies inputs, processing steps, model requirements, and outputs. Think of it as a recipe that an AI agent can execute without human supervision.
Each package declares its dependencies explicitly: which models it needs, what data formats it accepts, where outputs go. There is no hidden state. No vendor lock-in. The package runs on any ABWS-compatible runtime, which means you can switch providers without rewriting anything.
The protocol handles three concerns that SaaS currently bundles together:
- Execution logic — what the workflow actually does, step by step
- Resource management — which models and compute are needed, allocated on demand
- Data sovereignty — your data stays where you put it, processed where you choose
Unbundling these concerns is the point. SaaS bundles them because bundling is profitable. ABWS unbundles them because unbundling is better for the people using the software.
The first three packages
We are launching ABWS with three production-ready packages, built internally at OXYS and tested against real workloads:
ABWS/Recruit — End-to-end hiring pipeline. Resume parsing, candidate scoring, interview scheduling, and follow-up sequences. Replaces the core functionality of three or four recruiting SaaS products at a fraction of the ongoing cost.
ABWS/Reporting — Automated business intelligence. Connects to your data sources, generates analyses on a schedule or on demand, and delivers formatted reports. No dashboards to configure. No seat-based pricing.
ABWS/Support — Customer support triage and resolution. Classifies incoming tickets, drafts responses using your documentation and past resolutions, and escalates what it cannot handle. Integrates with your existing ticketing system rather than replacing it.
Each package is open-source at the protocol level. You can inspect every step, modify the workflow, or build your own packages using the same specification.
What this changes
ABWS does not eliminate SaaS overnight. Some products deliver value that cannot be reduced to a workflow — collaborative tools, creative software, platforms with strong network effects. Those will persist.
But a large portion of the SaaS market exists to run processes. Data in, transformation, data out. For that category, the economics have shifted permanently. An ABWS package costs a one-time fee plus compute. No per-seat pricing. No annual contracts. No feature gates.
We are not building ABWS because we dislike SaaS companies. We are building it because the technology now allows something better, and someone should.
The protocol specification is available now. The first three packages ship this month.