UBS Analysts Say AI Models May Replace Some Software Incumbents

UBS analysts see the latest artificial intelligence models from Anthropic and OpenAI as a threat to enterprise software companies, Seeking Alpha reported Tuesday (April 14).

These observations were published by UBS analysts Karl Keirstead and Dean Marriott in an investor report in which they shared what they saw at last week’s HumanX AI conference in San Francisco, according to the report.

The analysts said they learned from attendees that Anthropic and OpenAI are becoming “best-in-class application software firms,” that the companies’ customers are building AI apps and agents using Claude and ChatGPT, and that the software firms most likely to be safe from threats AI poses to software incumbents are those that secure and manage corporate data, per the report.

“One change we noticed at HumanX was the marked increase in AI agent investments, going well beyond the core use cases of Microsoft Copilot licenses and AI coding tools for software engineering,” the analysts wrote, per the report. “Bottom line, the customer checks supported the more cautious view of SaaS/apps software firms that is now priced into these stocks.”

PYMNTS reported April 8 that AI coding agents are viewed as a threat to enterprise software, though some observers say the markets have it wrong.

When Anthropic launched its Cowork legal plug-in in February, Wall Street wiped $285 billion from tech stocks over the following 24 hours.

At the time of that selloff, PYMNTS reported that Wall Street analysts pointed to the disruptive potential of new enterprise AI tools from providers such as Anthropic designed to automate processes like contract reviews and legal briefings.

AI is coming for the “mission critical” workflows of businesses and their back offices, creating a critical situation for the enterprise software space, the report said.

It was reported April 11 that close to a third of American businesses paid for Anthropic’s AI offerings last month. That number marked an increase of more than 6 percentage points from the prior month, demonstrating the rate at which businesses are adopting the company’s AI tools.

OpenAI said in the report that its AI coding agent Codex had seen its number of weekly users increase from 2 million to 3 million over a one-month period.