
Code unknown: What is spooking IT stocks?
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Artificial intelligence (AI) has come for the software industry. Since early January, software stocks across the world have tumbled sharply on investor fears that much of the business that software companies do will be taken over by AI, and by new AI giants such as Anthropic and OpenAI, among others.
These companies, along with the currently dominant tech giants such as Google and Microsoft, have committed hundreds of billions of dollars of investment in the space. The fear is that such massive investments in the AI sector will give them an unshakeable advantage in the coming years, and traditional software companies would be left far behind. In India, between 1 January and 20 February, even as the benchmark Nifty 50 declined about 2%, the Nifty IT Index, comprising IT companies such as Wipro, Infosys, and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), among others, fell about 16%.
The IT selloff has been global in nature. Markets see software services companies as under serious threat from AI tools. For instance, earlier in January, Anthropic released Claude CoWork, specifically aimed at doing tasks within sectors such as legal, sending stocks of companies making legal software into a tailspin.
Since CoWork is customized towards low-end work in more and more sectors, legacy software companies face deep uncertainty. According to Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs recently released a ‘pair’ trade basket of stocks split into two sets. One, a set of stocks to buy, of companies whose work is relatively difficult to replace by AI (Cloudflare, Oracle and Microsoft, among others).
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