| Thursday's Markets | |
|---|---|
| S&P 500 6,825 (+0.62%) |
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| Nasdaq 22,822 (+0.83%) |
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| Dow 48,186 (+0.58%) |
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| Bitcoin $72,282 (+1.18%) |
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Cybersecurity companies sold off on Thursday, with CrowdStrike (NASDAQ:CRWD) and Cloudflare (NYSE:NET) closing over 7% lower, as renewed fears around artificial intelligence (AI) disruption in the sector took hold following a new Anthropic model release.
Fool analyst Meilin Quinn, Team Hidden Gems
[Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) CEO] Jensen Huang is clear-eyed about AI's threat to software, but he thinks the best software companies might find new ways to get paid.
At GTC last month, he introduced the Nvidia Agent Toolkit, a platform for building and deploying AI agents inside large companies, and presented a future in which every SaaS company will need to become what he called an AaaS (agent-as-a-service) company.
The first products I would worry about are the ones that help humans look at work or sort work. Generic project-management tools fit that bucket, and so do dashboards that display data from other platforms. Agents do not need those interfaces if they can work directly inside the systems that hold company data.
When seat counts start declining, a lot of software companies are going to wish they had covered their AaaS. The meter still runs; it'll just bill for output now instead of headcount. That should favor the platforms that agents still have to go through, whether it's for data or for access. The next few quarters should make it easier to see which software businesses can carry their pricing power into an agent world and which ones start losing customers to leaner alternatives
Taiwan Semiconductor (NYSE:TSM) nudged up around 2% ahead of the opening bell after releasing first-quarter revenue numbers, with a strong 35% gain versus the same period last year, indicating continued AI application demand.
Which software companies do you think will emerge as winners? What gives them an edge?
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