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AI has been a frequent bogeyman to software stocks in the past year, with investors worried that AI agents could erode seat-based subscription pricing models and long-term growth. Shares of big incumbents such as Salesforce, Workday, Hubspot, ServiceNow and Adobe are down anywhere from 29% to 58% in that time frame, prompting some analysts and executives (at those companies) to argue that investors have overreacted. New posts and comments from people at JPMorgan Chase, the world’s biggest bank, and Anthropic, the AI juggernaut, agree. In a private webcast with investment clients this month, leaders from JPMorgan’s internal IT unit said they have no immediate plans to use AI to replace traditional enterprise apps and expect to increase spending with some existing providers that are launching more AI-enabled features, according to descriptions of the event posted on X by pseudonymous accounts and confirmed by a bank spokesperson. Such comments matter because JPM has an $18 billion annual technology budget and more than 300,000 employees, and thus has plenty of reasons to try to use AI to pare down those costs. Anthropic’s SaaS Love Employees at Anthropic, meanwhile, also use a bevy of legacy SaaS apps despite developing leading AI coding tools that help people create new apps in a jiffy. For instance, the Claude maker has a job posting for head of IT regulatory compliance, where “successful candidates may also have…experience with Workday, Salesforce, NetSuite….” Anthropic also agreed to let Intercom, its customer service provider, write on Intercom’s website that while “Anthropic could have easily chosen to build an in-house AI agent to power its customer service…the team saw a greater opportunity to partner with a company with deep expertise in AI-first customer service so they could remain laser focused on their goal of building safe, reliable, and transformative AI for humanity.” To be fair, Intercom uses Anthropic’s AI to power the tool, so it’s a relatively cost-effective solution for Anthropic! Enterprise app makers such as Microsoft, Canva, Salesforce and Figma also use Anthropic models to power some of their AI features, so Anthropic is incentivized to boost rather than subvert such apps. There’s more. Late last week, Anthropic released impressive features for its Claude chatbot to handle tasks involving Excel spreadsheets. (While Microsoft is competing with Anthropic in launching AI agents for workers, it might not be a bad thing for Microsoft if Anthropic effectively improves the usefulness of one of Microsoft’s core Office apps!) Lastly, in recent days, an Anthropic design lead for Claude posted on X that the “worst part about working at a company that keeps getting more successful is that gradual switch to enterprise-grade internal tools that no one likes using (see: workday).” The Anthropic employee later appeared to delete the post, but onlookers saw it as a ringing endorsement of the necessity of incumbent apps. Workday customers often talk smack about the HR app, even as they often acknowledge they don’t plan to replace it with AI for all kinds of reasons—including how it handles compliance and local laws; security and data. Workday also has some nifty AI features of its own. As Workday CEO Carl Eschenbach said in an interview with CNBC last week, “AI is a tailwind for us, it’s absolutely not a headwind.” He added: “We are uniquely positioned to be one of the AI winners in the enterprise because of our incumbency, and lastly, because of the trust we get from our customers.” It’s hard to argue with that right now, even if database firms say their customers can skip using apps like Workday by using AI on top of the data. Real Threats To be sure, the enterprise software firms’ revenues aren’t accelerating much in the AI era, in contrast to the growth enjoyed by some database and cloud providers. The enterprise firms still have a lot of work to do to figure out new products and pricing for AI agents that automate various white-collar tasks. And they have every right to be nervous, given that nearly every established seller of enterprise tools started marketing the same general-purpose AI agents that aim to handle everything from drafting emails to customers to resolving IT service tickets. It’s a scary free-for-all out there. These firms also have to contend with the possibility of ChatGPT and Claude becoming the gateway through which workers access enterprise apps. On Monday, for instance, Anthropic showed off new ways Claude users can access workplace apps such as Figma, Canva and Asana and from the chatbot itself. And let’s not forget that before too long, people may ask AI agents to essentially handle tasks inside of legacy enterprise apps, similar to the way humans use those apps! Microsoft says it’s already planning for that future, including selling subscriptions to those AI workers, so to speak. We are undoubtedly going to enter a period in which startups and other firms crow about their ability to kill their legacy SaaS contracts by using AI to create custom enterprise apps for their needs. But so long as up-and-coming corporations like Anthropic and megafirms like JPMorgan continue using older software apps alongside AI, the build-versus-buy debate about enterprise apps in the AI age will still lean toward “buy.” As Saumil Mehta, global president at Ticketmaster, put it in a post on X, there are far more beneficial ways for companies to use developer resources than getting AI to replace enterprise apps. “It’s foolish to think that I would spend any time saving a few bucks at the opportunity cost to the core business,” he said.
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