
The software apocalypse will be a buying opportunity—eventually
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. On Tuesday, the roof caved in on software, media, and information company stocks like Salesforce, Reddit and Thomson Reuters. The proximate cause was the introduction of the latest artificial-intelligence tools from start-up Anthropic, which much of the market interpreted as an existential threat to any company that doesn’t make physical goods.
The handwringing is overblown. While the AI tools show the potential power of AI in office work, they’re not ready for prime time and, in fact, could prove dangerous to the companies that use them. More importantly, these agents remain dependent on the same software and information sources that investors seem to think they will replace.
Once the dust settles, there will be a lot of companies in the software, media, and information sectors with attractive valuations. Private equity buyers are probably licking their chops; Orlando Bravo, the founder of private-equity firm Thoma Bravo, said as much during an interview from Davos last month. Salesforce, the pioneer in cloud software, now trades for just 15 times forward earnings, its lowest price/earnings ratio on record.
The technologies at the root of the selloff all are part of Claude Cowork, a desktop agent that for now is only available on Mac computers. Agents use large-language models to accomplish a complex series of tasks from a simple prompt. For example: “Go through my emails and messages, find all the deliverables I have this week, and create first drafts of them, including any charts and slide decks.
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