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Anthropic on Tuesday unveiled new details of how businesses could use its Claude Cowork AI software to access and use data stored in enterprise apps, including DocuSign, LegalZoom and Salesforce. Given the recent market jitters about the disruptive impact of AI on these software firms, you’d think the news would have depressed stocks even more. Instead, stocks recovered a bit. Figma shares, for instance, were up 10%, while ServiceNow inched up 1.4% and Salesforce rose 4%. What’s going on? Possibly the actual details weren’t as bad as some investors had feared. Indeed, Tuesday’s update seems to position Claude Cowork as a potential replacement for employees rather than the software they use. New AI tools will continue to use the software, which means businesses will still have to pay for it. (For more on what Cowork actually does, see this, this and this.) It’s a delicate balance Anthropic seems keenly aware of. At an event announcing the new Cowork features, the AI firm looped in its head of economics, Peter McCrory, who said AI’s impact on labor would be “very uneven.” He said high-skilled workers would become more productive with AI while lower level data-entry workers could potentially be replaced. Derek Hernandez, an analyst at PitchBook Data, said Anthropic’s Claude features for financial services tasks could put jobs in that field at risk. “The disruption is seats at investment banks, seats in equity research, white collar jobs particularly on the lowest levels,” he said. The tone Anthropic used is striking because it highlights partnerships, rather than competition, with software providers and risks to human employees. And inside Anthropic, employees continue to use all manner of traditional enterprise apps, as we’ve noted before. While that shouldn’t completely allay concerns from software providers—who of course benefit from larger workforces rather than shrinking ones—it contrasts somewhat with OpenAI’s public and private messaging about enterprise apps. To be sure, OpenAI has struck similar partnerships with enterprise firms like Salesforce, such as allowing ChatGPT customers to use Salesforce apps from the chatbot. But OpenAI told its investors in a meeting last week that its AI agents and future products would be capable of replacing software from tech firms including Salesforce, Workday, Adobe and Atlassian, my colleagues reported Friday. As if to emphasize the point, OpenAI showed investors the revenues of those enterprise software firms, its own current revenue and the gargantuan revenue it projected to generate by 2030. (Of course, much of that revenue will come from OpenAI’s consumer ChatGPT business, not from enterprises per se.) OpenAI leaders also told investors it believes the average worker using ChatGPT is saving about 50 minutes per day, translating to savings of about $50 a day per person. (For those calculations, OpenAI relied in part on estimates from Ark Invest, an OpenAI shareholder.) The business-friendly version of ChatGPT starts at $25 per worker per month, so OpenAI believes it’s only capturing a small fraction of the value it’s providing. The private comments appear to confirm what many in the enterprise software world suspected when OpenAI announced its new “Frontier” AI product last month. It sees its technology as sitting on top of companies’ enterprise applications that store critical corporate data, exerting more influence on how businesses use and pay for software and AI. Meantime, many legacy software providers are staging a defense from the potential assault they face from OpenAI and its AI ilk. As we reported this morning, companies like ServiceNow and Microsoft are, predictably, aiming to convince customers that their software is more reliable than AI from labs like OpenAI and Anthropic. Other enterprise firms such as HubSpot are thinking about charging customers who want to use AI agents to tap their data stored in HubSpot’s systems. “We are not a free data pipeline for everybody to take that information out,” HubSpot CEO Yamini Rangan told shareholders earlier this month. The question now is how much power HubSpot and its ilk will have to slow down AI agents. The whole point of AI agents like OpenClaw is to take over a person’s computer and use apps the way that person would. Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in a 2024 podcast that he didn’t think his company would be able to block AI agents from using enterprise apps. We’ll be closely following efforts from HubSpot and others to act as a kind of tollbooth operator, extracting what they can from customers using AI. We imagine this move will generate some fireworks. Enterprise firms’ strongest defense against AI upstarts is their longstanding experience in complying with global data laws and privacy regulations—something that experimental AI products might not be able to handle for some time. It’s worth noting that most of the customers we’ve spoken to in recent weeks haven’t actually tried to replace enterprise software with AI. But some of them said they’re increasingly relying on agents to automate tasks using the raw data sitting in their existing systems, which is changing how employees interact with the software. For instance, one cybersecurity executive told us he used an AI agent to avoid spending over $100,000 in annual fees for a CrowdStrike product that automated the process of managing employees’ accounts. The tool can flag suspicious logins, or find accounts that appear dormant—indicating an employee left the company but wasn’t properly offboarded—and automatically lock them down. Instead of using the CrowdStrike product, which can cost up to hundreds of dollars per user per month, he found he could do the same thing by hooking up an AI agent from the startup Torq, powered by OpenAI and Anthropic models, to his company’s raw login data that was already being collected by its Microsoft software. The Torq agent automated the account “cleanup” at a much lower price. (Read our full story for more details.) That doesn’t necessarily mean all older software products are at risk of losing money, especially if customers need to keep them around as data sources for AI agents. (CrowdStrike said in a statement that it lets such AI agents connect to its software so customers can use them together.) But in the nearer term, it could make software products feel less crucial to customers and their employees, who may instead come to see AI as the primary tool for work.
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